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Title: The Trail of the White Mule
Author: B. M. Bower
Posting Date: November 19, 2008 [EBook #2063]
Release Date: February, 2000
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRAIL OF THE WHITE MULE ***
Produced by Daniel Wentzell. HTML version by Al Haines.
THE TRAIL OF THE WHITE MULE
by
B. M. Bower
CHAPTER ONE
Casey Ryan, hunched behind the wheel of a large, dark blue touring car
with a kinked front fender and the glass gone from the left headlight,
slid out from the halted traffic, shied sharply away from a
hysterically clanging street car, crossed the path of a huge red truck
coming in from his right, missed it with two inches to spare and was
halfway down the block before the traffic officer overtook him.
The traffic officer was Irish too, and bigger than Casey, and madder.
For all that, Casey offered to lick the livin' tar outa him before
accepting a pale, expensive ticket which he crumbled and put into his
pocket without looking at it.
"What I know about these here fancy city rules ain't sufficient to give
a horn-toad a headache--but it's a darn sight more'n I care," Casey
declaimed hotly. "I never was asked what I thought of them tin signs
you stick up on the end of a telegraft pole, to tell folks when to go
an' when to quit goin'. Mebby it's all right fer these here city
drivers--"
"This'll mean thirty days for you," spluttered the officer. "I ought
to call the patrol right now--"
"Get the undertaker on the line first!" Casey advised him ominously.
Traffic was piling up behind them, and horns were honking a blatant
chorus that extended two blocks up the street. The traffic officer
glanced into the troubled gray eyes of the Little Woman beside Casey
and took his foot off the running board.
"Better go put up your bail and then forfeit it," he advised in a
milder tone. "The judge will probably remember you; I do, and my
memory ain't the best in the world. Twice you've been hooked for
speeding through traffic; and parking by fire-plugs and in front of the
No Park signs and after four, seems to be your big outdoor sport.
Forfeit your bail, old boy--or it's thirty days for you, sure."
Casey Ryan made bitter retort, but the traffic cop had gone to untangle
two furious Fords from a horse-drawn mail wagon, so he did not hear.
Which was good luck for Casey.
"Why do you persist in making trouble for yourself?" the Little Woman
beside him exclaimed. "It can't be so hard to obey the rules; other
drivers do. I know that I have driven this car all over town without
any trouble whatever."
Casey hogged the next safety-zone line to the deep disgust of a young
movie star in a cream-and-silver racer, and pulled in to the curb just
where he could not be passed.
"All right, ma'am. You can drive, then." He slid out of the driver's
seat to the pavement, his face a deeper shade of red than usual.
"For pity's sake, Casey! Don't be silly," his wife cried sharply, a
bit of panic in her voice.
"You was in a hurry to git home," Casey pointed out to her with that
mildness of manner which is not mild. "I was hurryin', wasn't I?"
"You aren't hurrying now--you're delaying the traffic again. Do be
reasonable! You know it costs money to argue with the police."
"Police be damned! I'm tryin' to please a woman, an' I'm up agin a
hard proposition. You can ask anybody if I'm the unreasonable one. You
hustled me out of the show soon as the huggin' commenced. You wouldn't
even let me stay to see the first of Mutt and Jeff. You said you was
in a hurry. I leaves the show without seein' the best part, gits the
car an' drills through the traffic tryin' to git yuh home quick. Now
you're kickin' because I did hurry."
"Hey! Whadda yuh mean, blockin' the traffic?" a domineering voice
behind him bellowed. "This ain't any reception hall, and it ain't no
free auto park neither."
Another traffic officer with another pencil and another pad of tickets
such as drivers dread to see began to write down the number of Casey's
car. This man did not argue. He finished his work briskly, presented
another notice which advised Casey Ryan to report immediately to police
headquarters, waved Casey peremptorily to proceed, and returned to his
little square platform to the chorus of blatting automobile horns.
"The cops in this town hands out tickets like they was Free Excursion
peddlers!" snorted Casey, his eyes a pale glitter behind his
half-closed lids. "They can go around me, or they can honk and be
darned to 'em. Git behind the wheel, ma'am--Casey Ryan's drove the last
inch he'll ever drive in this darned town. If they pinch me again,
it'll have to be fer walkin'."
The Little Woman looked at him, pressed her lips together and moved
behind the wheel. She did not say a word all the way out to the white
apartment house on Vermont which held the four rooms they called home.
She parked the car dexterously in front and led the way to their
apartment (ground floor, front) before she looked at me.
"It's coming to a show-down, Jack," she said then with a faint smile.
"He's on probation already for disobeying traffic rules of one sort and
other, and his fines cost more than the entire upkeep of the car. I
think he really will have to go to jail this time. It just isn't in
Casey Ryan to take orders from any one, especially when his own
personal habits of driving a car are concerned."
"Town life is getting on his nerves," I tried to defend Casey, and at
the same time to comfort the Little Woman. "I didn't think it would
work, his coming here to live, with nothing to do but spend money.
This is the inevitable result of too much money and too much leisure."
"It sounds much better, putting it that way," murmured Mrs. Casey. "I
think you're right--though he did behave back there as if it were too
much matrimony. Jack, he's been looking forward to your visit. I'm
sorry this has happened to spoil it."
"It isn't spoiled," I grinned. "Casey Ryan is, always and ever shall be
Casey Ryan. He's running true to form, though tamer than one would
expect. When do you think he'll show up?"
Mrs. Casey did not know. She ventured a guess or two, but there was no
conviction in her tone. With two nominal arrests in five minutes
chalked against him, and with his first rebellion against the Little
Woman to rankle in his conscience and memory, she owned herself at a
loss.
With a cheerfulness that was only conversation deep, we waited for
Casey and finally ate supper without him. The evening was enlivened
somewhat by Babe's chatter of kindergarten doings; and was punctuated
by certain pauses while steps on the sidewalk passed on or ended with
the closing of another door than the Ryans'. I fought the impulse to
call up the police station, and I caught the eyes of the Little Woman
straying unconsciously to the telephone in the hall while she talked of
things remote from our inner thoughts. Margaret Ryan is game, I'll say
that. We played cribbage for an hour or two, and the Little Woman beat
me until finally I threw up my hands and quit.
"I can't stand it any longer, Mrs. Casey. Do you think he's in jail,
or just sulking at a movie somewhere?" I blurted. "Forgive my butting
in, but I wish you'd talk about it. You know you can, to me. Casey
Ryan is a friend and more than a friend: he's a pet theory of mine--a
fad, if you prefer to call him that.
"I consider him a perfect example of human nature in its unhampered,
unbiased state, going straight through life without deviating a hair's
breadth from the viewpoint of youth. A fighter and a castle builder; a
sort of rough-edged Peter Pan. Till he gums soft food and hobbles with
a stick because the years have warped his back and his legs, Casey Ryan
will keep that indefinable, bubbling optimism of spiritual youth. So
tell me all about him. I want to know who has licked, so far; luxury
or Casey Ryan."
The Little Woman laughed and picked up the cards, evening their edges
with sensitive fingers that had not been manicured so beautifully when
first I saw them.
"Well-sir," she drawled, making one word of the two and failing to keep
a little twitching from her lips, "I think it's been about a tie, so
far. As a husband--Casey's a darned good bachelor." Her chuckle
robbed that statement of anything approaching criticism. "Aside from
his insisting on cooking breakfast every morning and feeding me in bed,
forcing me to eat fried eggs and sour-dough hotcakes swimming in butter
and honey--when I crave grapefruit and thin toast and one French lamb
chop with a white paper frill on the handle and garnished with fresh
parsley--he's the soul of consideration. He wants four kinds of jam on
the table every meal, when fresh fruit is going to waste. He's bullied
the laundryman until the poor fellow's reached the point where he won't
stop if the car's parked in front and Casey's liable to be home; but
aside from that, Casey's all right.
"After serving time in the desert and rustling my own wood and living
on bacon and beans and sour-dough bread, I'm perfectly willing to
spend the rest of my life doing painless housekeeping with all the
modern built-in features ever invented; and buying my bread and cakes
and salads from the delicatessen around the corner. I never want to
see a sagebush again as long as I live, or feel the crunch of gravel
under my feet. I expect to die in French-heeled pumps and embroidered
silk stockings and the finest, silliest silk things ever put in a show
window to tempt the soul of a woman. But it took just two weeks and
three days to drive Casey back to his sour-dough can."
"He craved luxury more than you seemed to do," I remembered aloud.
"He did, yes. But his idea of luxury is sitting down in the kitchen to
a real meal of beans and biscuits and all the known varieties of jam
and those horrible whitewashed store cookies and having the noise of
the phonograph drowned every five minutes by a passing street car.
Casey wants four movies a day, and he wants them all funny. He brings
home silk shirts with the stripes fairly shrieking when he unwraps
them--and he has to be thrown and tied to get a collar on him.
"He will get up at any hour of the night to chase after a fire engine,
and every whipstitch he gets pinched for doing something which is
perfectly lawful and right in the desert and perfectly awful in the
city. You saw him," said the Little Woman, "to-day." And she added
wistfully, "It's the first time since we were married that he has ever
talked back--to me.
"And you know," she went on, shuffling the cards and stopping to regard
the joker attentively (though I am sure she didn't know what card she
was looking at), "just chasing around town and doing nothing but square
yourself for not playing according to the rules costs money without
getting you anywhere. Fifty-five thousand dollars isn't so much just
to play with, in this town. Casey's highest ambition now seems to be
nickel disk wheels on a new racing car that can make the speed cops go
some to catch him. His idea of economy is to put six or seven thousand
dollars into a car that will enable him to outrun a twenty-dollar fine!
"We have some money invested," she went on. "We own this apartment
house--and fortunately it's in my name. So long as the housing problem
continues critical, I think I can keep Casey going without spending our
last cent."
"He did one good stroke of business," I ventured, "when he bought this
place. Apartment houses are good as gold mines these days."
The Little Woman laughed. "Well-sir, it wasn't so much a stroke as it
was a wallop. Casey bought it just to show who was boss, he or the
landlord. The first thing he did when we moved in was to take down the
nicely framed rules that said we must not cook cabbage nor onions nor
fish, nor play music after ten o'clock at night, nor do any loud
talking in the halls.
"Every day for a week Casey cooked cabbage, onions and fish. He sat up
nights to play the graphophone. He stayed home to talk loudly and play
bucking bronk with Babe all up and down the stairs and in the halls.
Our rent was paid for a month in advance, and the landlord was too
little and old to fight. So he sold out cheap--and it really was a
good stroke of business for us, though not deliberate.
"Well-sir, at first we lost tenants who didn't enjoy the freedom of
their neighbors' homes. But really, Jack, you'd be surprised to know
how many people in this city just LOVE cabbage and onions and fish, and
to have children they needn't disown whenever they go house-hunting. I
had ventilator hoods put over every gas range in the house, and turned
the back yard into a playground with plenty of sand piles and swings.
I raised the price, too, and made the place look very select, with a
roof garden for the grown-ups. We have the house filled now with
really nice families--avoiding the garlic brand--and as an investment I
wouldn't ask for anything better.
"Casey enjoyed himself hugely while he was whipping things into shape,
but the last month he's been going stale. The tenants are all so
thankful to do as they please that they're excruciatingly polite to
him, no matter what he does or says. He's tired of the beaches and he
has begun to cuss the long, smooth roads that are signed so that he
couldn't get lost if he tried. It does seem as if there's no interest
left in anything, unless he can get a kick out of going to jail. And,
Jack, I do believe he's gone there."
The telephone rang and the Little Woman excused herself and went into
the hall, closing the door softly behind her.
I'm not greatly given to reminiscence, but while I sat and watched the
flames of civilization licking tamely at the impregnable iron bark of
the gas logs, the eyes of my memory looked upon a picture:
Desert, empty and with the mountains standing back against the sky, the
great dipper uptilted over a peak and the stars bending close for very
friendliness. The licking flames of dry greasewood burning, with a
pungent odor in my nostrils when the wind blew the smoke my way. The
far-off hooting of an owl, perched somewhere on a juniper branch
watching for mice; and Casey Ryan sitting cross-legged in the sand,
squinting humorously at me across the fire while he talked.
I saw him, too, bolting a hurried breakfast under a mesquite tree in
the chill before sunrise, his mind intent upon the trail; facing the
desert and its hardships as a matter of course, with never a thought
that other men would shrink from the ordeal.
I saw him kneeling before a solid face of rock in a shallow cut in the
hillside, swinging his "single-jack" with tireless rhythm; a tap and a
turn of the steel, a tap and a turn--chewing tobacco industriously and
stopping now and then to pry off a fresh bit from the plug in his hip
pocket before he reached for the "spoon" to muck out the hole he was
drilling.
I saw him larruping in his Ford along a sandy, winding trail it would
break a snake's back to follow, hot on the heels of his next adventure,
dreaming of the fortune that finally came. . . .
The Little Woman came in looking as if she had been talking with
Destiny and was still dazed and unsteady from the meeting.
"Well-sir, he's gone!" she announced, and stopped and tried to smile.
But her eyes looked hurt and sorry. "He has bought a Ford and a tent
and outfit since he left us down on Seventh and Broadway, and he just
called me up on long-distance from San Bernardino. He's going out on a
prospecting trip, he says. I'll say he's been going some! A speed cop
overhauled him just the other side of Claremont, he told me, and he was
delayed for a few minutes while he licked the cop and kicked him and
his motorcycle into a ditch. He says he's sorry he sassed me, and if I
can drive a car in this darned town and not spend all my loose change
paying fines, I'm a better man than he is. He doesn't know when he'll
be back--and there you are."
She sat down wearily on the arm of an over-stuffed armchair and looked
up at the gilt-and-onyx clock which I suspected Casey of having bought.
"If he isn't lynched before morning," she sighed whimsically, "he'll
probably make it to the Nevada line all right."
I rose, also glancing at the clock. But the Little Woman put up a hand
to forbid the plan she read in my mind.
"Let him alone, Jack," she advised. "Let him go and be just as wild
and devilish as he wants to be. I'm only thankful he can take it out
on a Ford and a pick and shovel. There really isn't any trouble
between us two. Casey knows I can look out for myself for awhile.
He's got to have a vacation from loafing and matrimony. I'm so thankful
he isn't taking it in jail!"
I told her somewhat bluntly that she was a brick, and that if I could
get in touch with Casey I'd try to keep an eye on him. It would
probably be a good thing, I told her, if he did stay away long enough
to let this collection of complaints against him be forgotten at the
police station.
I went away, hoping fervently that Casey would break even his own
records that night. I really intended to find him and keep an eye on
him. But keeping an eye on Casey Ryan is a more complicated affair
than it sounds.
Wherefore, much of this story must be built upon my knowledge of Casey
and a more or less complete report of events in which I took no part,
welded together with a bit of healthy imagination.
CHAPTER TWO
Casey Ryan knew his desert. Also, from long and not so happy
experience, he knew Fords, or thought he did. He made the mistake,
however, of buying a nearly new one and asking it to accomplish the
work of a twin six from the moment he got behind the wheel.
He was fortunate in buying a demonstrator's car with a hundred miles or
so to its credit. He arrived in Barstow before the proprietor of a
supply store had gone to bed--for which he was grateful to the Ford. He
loaded up there with such necessities for desert prospecting as he had
not waited to buy in Los Angeles, turned short off the main highway
where traffic officers might be summoned by telephone to lie in wait
for him, and took the steeper and less used trail north. He was still
mad and talking bitterly to himself in an undertone while he
drove--telling the new Ford what he thought of city rules and city
ways, and driving it as no Ford was ever meant by its maker to be
driven.
The country north of Barstow is not to be taken casually in the middle
of a dark night, even by Casey Ryan and a Ford. The roads, once you
are well away from help, are all pretty much alike, and all bad. And
although the white, diamond-shaped signs of a beneficent automobile
club are posted here and there, where wrong turnings are most likely to
prove disastrous to travelers, Casey Ryan was in the mood to lick any
man who pointed out a sign to him. He did see one or two in spite of
himself and gave a grunt of contempt. So, where he should have turned
to the east (his intention being to reach Nevada by way of Silver Lake)
he continued traveling north and didn't know it.
Driving across the desert on a dark night is confusing to the most
observant wayfarer. On either side, beyond the light of the car,
illusory forest stands for mile upon mile. Up hill or down or across
the level it is the same--a narrow, winding trail through dimly seen
woods. The most familiar road grows strange; the miles are longer; you
drive through mystery and silence and the world around you is a
formless void.
Dawn and a gorgeous sunrise painted out the woods and revealed barren
hilltops which Casey did not know. Because he did not know them, he
guessed shrewdly that he was on his way to the wilderness of mountains
and sand which lies west of Death Valley. Small chance he had of
hearing the shop whistles blow in Las Vegas at noon, as he had expected.
He was telling himself that he didn't care where he went, when the car,
laboring more and more reluctantly up a long, sandy hill, suddenly
stopped. In Casey's heart was a thrill at the sheer luxury of stopping
in the middle of the road without having some thick-necked cop stride
toward him bawling insults. That he was obliged to stop, and that a
hill uptilted before him, and the sand was a foot deep outside the ruts
failed to impress him with foreboding. He gloried in his freedom and
thought not at all of the Ford.
He climbed stiffly out, squinted at the sky line, which was jagged, and
at his immediate surroundings, which were barren and lonely and
soothing to his soul that hungered for these things. Great, gaunt
"Joshua" trees stood in grotesque groups all up and down the narrow
valley, hiding the way he had come from the way he would go. It was as
if the desert had purposely dropped a curtain before his past and would
show him none of his future. Whereat Casey Ryan grinned, took a chew of
tobacco and was himself again.
"If they wanta come pinch me here, I'll meet 'em man to man. Back in
town no man's got a show. They pile in four deep and gang a feller.
Out here it's lick er git licked. They can all go t' thunder. Tahell
with town!"
The odor of coffee boiling in a new pot which the sagebrush fire was
fast blackening; the salty, smoky smell of bacon frying in a new frying
pan that turned bluish with the heat; the sizzle of bannock batter
poured into hot grease--these things made the smiling mouth of Casey
Ryan water with desire.
"Hell!" said Casey, breathing deep when, stomach full and resentment
toward the past blurred by satisfaction with his present, he filled his
pipe and fingered his vest pocket for a match. "Gas stoves can't cook
nothin' so there's any taste to it. That there's the first real meal
I've et in six months. Light a match and turn on the gas and call that
a fire! Hunh! Good old sage er greasewood fer Casey Ryan, from here
on!"
He laid back against the sandy sidehill, tilted his hat over his eyes
and crossed his legs luxuriously. He was in no hurry to continue his
journey. Now that he and the desert were alone together, haste and
Casey Ryan held nothing in common. For awhile he watched a Joshua palm
that looked oddly like a giant man with one arm hanging loose at its
side and another pointing fixedly at a distant, black-capped butte
standing aloof from its fellows. Casey was tired after his night on
the trail. Easy living in town had softened his muscles and slowed a
little that untiring energy which had balked at no hardship. He was
drowsy, and his brain stopped thinking logically and slipped into
half-waking fancy.
The Joshua seemed to move, to lift its arm and point more imperatively
toward the peak. Its ungainly head seemed to turn and nod at Casey.
What did the darned thing want? Casey would go when he, got good and
ready. Perhaps he would go that way, and perhaps he would not. Right
here was good enough for Casey Ryan at present; and you could ask
anybody if he were the man to follow another man's pointing, much less
a Joshua tree.
Battering rain woke Casey some hours later and drove him to the shelter
of the Ford. Thunder and lightning came with the rain, and a bellowing
wind that rocked the car and threatened once or twice to overturn it.
With some trouble Casey managed to button down the curtains and sat
huddled on the front seat, watching through a streaming windshield the
buffeted wilderness. He was glad he had not unloaded his outfit;
gladder still that the storm had not struck which he was traveling.
Down the trail toward him a small river galloped, washing deep gullies
where the wheels of his car offered obstruction to its boisterousness.
"She's a tough one," grinned Casey, in spite of the chattering of his
teeth. "Looks like all the water in the world is bein' poured down
this pass. Keeps on, I'll have to gouge out a couple of Joshuays an'
turn the old Ford into a boat--but Casey'll keep agoin'!"
Until inky dark it rained like the deluge. Casey remained perched in
his one-man ark and tried hard to enjoy himself and his hard-won
freedom. He stabbed open a can of condensed milk, poured it into a
cup, and drank it and ate what was left of his breakfast bannock, which
he had fortunately put away in the car out of the reach of a hill of
industrious red ants.
He thought vaguely of cranking the car and going on, but gave up the
notion. One sidehill, he decided, was as good as another sidehill for
the present.
That night Casey slept fitfully in the car and discovered that even a
wall bed in a despised apartment house may be more comfortable than the
front seat of a Ford. His bones ached by morning, and he was hungry
enough to eat raw bacon and relish it. But the sun was fighting through
the piled clouds and shone cheerfully upon the draggled pass, and Casey
boiled coffee and fried bacon and bannock beside the trail, and for a
little while was happy again.
From breakfast until noon he was busy as a beaver repairing the washout
beneath the car and on to the top of the hill. She was going to have to
get down and dig in her toes to make it, he told the Ford, when at last
he heaved pick and shovel into the tonneau, packed in his cooking
outfit and made ready to crank up.
From then until supper time he wore a trail around the car, looking to
see what was wrong and why he could not crank. He removed
hootin'-annies and dingbats (using Casey's mechanical terms) looked
them over dissatisfiedly, and put them back without having done them ny
good whatever. Sometimes they were returned to a different place, I
imagine, since I know too well how impartial Casey is with the
mechanical parts of a Ford.
He made camp there that night, pitching his little tent in the trail
for pure cussedness, and defying aloud a traveling world to make him
move until he got good and ready. He might have saved his vocabulary,
for the road was impassable before him and behind; and had Casey
managed to start the car, he could not have driven a mile in either
direction.
Since he did not know that, the next day he painstakingly cleaned the
spark plugs and tried again to crank the Ford; couldn't, and removed
more hootin'-annies and dingbats than he had touched the day before.
That night he once more pitched his tent in the trail, hoping in his
heart that some one would drive along and dispute his right to camp
there; when he would lick the doggone cuss.
On the fourth day, after a long, fatiguing session with the vitals of a
Ford that refused to be cranked, Casey was busy gathering brush, for
his supper fire when Fate came walking up' the trail. Fate appears in
many forms. In this instance it assumed the shape of a packed burro
that poked its nose around a group of Joshuas, stopped abruptly and
backed precipitately into another burro which swung out of the trail
and went careening awkwardly down the slope. The stampeding burro had
not seen the Ford at all, but accepted the testimony of its leader that
something was radically wrong with the trail ahead. His pack bumped
against the yuccas as he went; after him lurched a large man, heavy to
the point of fatness, yelling hoarse threats and incoherent
objurgations.
Casey threw down his armful of dead brush and went after the lead burro
which was blazing itself a trail in an entirely different direction.
The lead burro had four large canteens strapped outside its pack, and
Casey was growing so short of water that he had begun to debate
seriously the question of draining the radiator on the morrow.
I don't suppose many of you would believe the innate cussedness of a
burro when it wants to be that way. Casey hazed this one to the hills
and back down the trail for half a mile before he rushed it into a
clump of greasewood and sneaked up on it when it thought itself hidden
from all mortal eyes. After that he dug heels into the sand and hung
on. Memory resurrected for his need certain choice phrases coined in
times of stress for the ears of burros alone. Luxury and civilization
and fifty-five thousand dollars and a wife were as if they had never
been. He was Casey Ryan, the prospector, fighting a stubborn donkey
all over a desert slope. He led it conquered back to the Ford, tied it
to a wheel and lifted off the four canteens, gratified with their
weight and hoping there were more on the other burro. He had quite
forgotten that he had meant to lick the first man he saw, and grinned
when the fat man came toiling back with the other animal.
By the time their coffee was boiled and their bacon fried, each one
knew the other's past history and tentative plans for the future,
censored and glossed somewhat by the teller but received without
question or criticism.
The fat man's name was Barney Oakes, and he had heard of Casey Ryan and
was glad to meet him. Though Casey had never heard of Barney Oakes, he
discovered that they both knew Bill Masters, the garage man at Lund;
and further gossip revealed the amazing fact that Barney Oakes had once
been the husband of the woman whom Casey had very nearly married, the
widow who cooked for the Lucky Lode.
"Boy, you're sure lucky she turned loose on yuh before yuh went an'
married her!" Barney congratulated Casey, slapping his great thigh and
laughing loudly. "She shore is handy with her tongue--that old girl.
Ever hear a sawmill workin' overtime? That's her--rippin' through knots
an' never blowin' the whistle fer quittin' time. I never knowed a man
could have as many faults as what she used t' name over fer me." He
drained his cup and sighed with great content. "At that, I stayed with
her seven months and fourteen days," he boasted. "I admit, two of them
months I was laid up with a busted ankle an' shoulder blade. Tunnel
caved in on me."
They talked late that night and were comrades, brothers, partners share
and share alike before they slept. Next morning Casey tried again to
start the Ford; couldn't; and yielded to Barney's argument that burros
were better than a car for prospectin' in that rough country. They
overhauled Casey's outfit, took all the grub and as much else as the
burros could carry and debated seriously what point in the Panamints
they should aim for.
"Where's that there Joshuay tree pointin' to?" Casey asked finally.
"She's the biggest and oldest in the bunch, and ever since I've been
here she's looked like she's got somethin' on 'er mind. Whadda yuh
think, Barney?"
Barney walked around the yucca, stood behind the extended arm, squinted
at the sharp-peaked butte with the black capping, toward which the
gaunt tree seemed to point. He spat out a stale quid of tobacco and
took a fresh one, squinted again toward the butte and looked at Casey.
"She's country I never prospected in, back in there. I've follered
poorer advice than a Joshuay. Le's try it a whirl."
Thus it came to pass that Casey Ryan forsook his Ford for a strange
partner with two burros and a clouded past, and fared forth across the
barren foothills with no better guidance than the rigid, outstretched
limb of a great, gaunt Joshua tree.
CHAPTER THREE
In a still sunny gulch which shadows would presently fill to the brim,
Casey Ryan was reaching, soiled bandanna in his hand, to pull a pot of
bubbling coffee from the coals,--a pot now blackened with the smoke of
many campfires to prove how thoroughly a part of the open land it had
become. Something nipped at his right shoulder, and at the same
instant ticked the coffeepot and overturned it into a splutter of steam
and hot ashes. The spiteful crack of a rifle shot followed close.
Casey ducked behind a nose of rock, and big Barney Oakes scuttled for
cover, spilling bacon out of the frying pan as he went.
For a week the two had been camped in this particular gulch, which drew
in to a mere wrinkle on the southwestern slope of the black-topped
butte, toward which the Joshua tree in the pass had directed them.
Nearly a week they had spent toiling across the hilly, waterless waste,
with two harrowing days when their canteens flopped empty on the burros
and big Barney stumbled oftener than Casey liked to see. Casey himself
had gone doggedly ahead, his body bent forward, his square shoulders
sagging a bit, but with never a thought of doing anything but go on.
A red splotch high up on the side of this gulch promised "water
formation" as prospectors have a way of putting it. They had found the
water, else adventure would have turned to tragedy. Near the water they
had also found a promising outcropping of silver-bearing quartz.
Barney's blowpipe had this very day shown them silver in
castle-building quantities.
Just at this moment, however, they were not thinking of mines. They
were eyeing a round hole in the coffeepot from which a brown rivulet
ran spitting into the blackening coals.
Casey was the more venturesome. He raised himself to see if he could
discover where the bullet had come from, and very nearly met the fate
of the coffeepot. He felt the wind of a second bullet that spatted
against a boulder near Barney. Barney burrowed deeper into his covert.
Casey went down on all fours and crawled laboriously toward a
concealing bank covered thick with brush. A third bullet clipped a
twig of sage just about three inches above the middle of his back, and
Casey flattened on his stomach and swore. Some one on the peak of the
hill had good eyesight, he decided. Neither spoke, other than to swear
in undertones; for voices carried far in that clear atmosphere, and
nothing could be gained by conversation.
Darkness never had poured so slowly into that gulch since the world was
young. The campfire had died to black embers before Casey ventured
from his covert, and Barney Oakes seemed to have holed up for the
season. Unless you have lived for a long while in a land altogether
empty of any human life save your own, you cannot realize the effect of
having mysterious bullets zip past your ears and ruin your supper for
you.
"Somebody's gunnin' fer us, looks like t' me," Barney observed
belatedly in a hoarse whisper, from his covert.
"Found that out, did yuh? Well, it ain't the first time Casey's been
shot at and missed," Casey retorted peevishly in the lee of the bank.
"Say! I knowed the sing of bullets before I was old enough to carry a
tune."
"So'd I," boasted Barney, "but that ain't sayin' I learned t' like the
song."
"What I'm figurin' out now," said Casey, "is how to get up there an' AT
'am. An' how we kin do it without him seein' us. Goin' t' be kinda
ticklish--but it ain't the first ticklish job Casey Ryan ever tackled."
"It can't be did," Barney stated flatly. "An' if it could be did, I
wouldn't do it. I ain't as easy t' miss as what you be. I got bulk."
"A hole bored through your tallow might mebbe do you good," Casey
suggested harshly. "Might let in a little sand. You can't never
tell--"
"My vitals," said Barney with dignity, "is just as close to the surface
as what your vitals be. I ain't so fat--I'm big. An' I got all the
sand I need. I also have got sense, which some men lacks."
"What yuh figurin' on doin'?" Casey wanted to know. "Set here under a
bush an' let 'em pick yuh up same as they would a cottontail, mebbe? We
got a hull night to work in, an' Casey's eyes is as good as anybody's
in the dark. More'n that, Casey's six-gun kin shoot just as hard an'
fast as a rifle--let 'im git close enough."
Barney did not want to be left alone and said so frankly. Neither did
he want to climb the butte. He could see no possible gain in climbing
to meet an enemy or enemies who could hear the noise of approach. It
was plain suicide, he declared, and Barney Oakes was not ready to die.
But Casey could never listen to argument when a fight was in prospect.
He filled a canteen, emptied a box of cartridges into his pocket, stuck
his old, Colt six-shooter inside his trousers belt, and gave Barney
some parting instruction under his breath.
Barney was to move camp down under the bank by the spring, and dig
himself in there, so that the only approach would be up the narrow
gulch. He would then wait until Casey returned.
"Somebody's after our outfit, most likely," Casey reasoned. "It ain't
the first time I've knowed it to happen. So you put the hull outfit
outa sight down there an' stand guard over it. If we'd 'a' run when
they opened up, they'd uh cleaned us out and left us flat. They's two
of us, an' we'll git 'em from two sides."
He stuffed cold bannock into the pocket that did not hold the
cartridges and disappeared, climbing the side of the gulch opposite the
point which held their ambitious marksman.
To Barney's panicky expostulations he had given little heed. "If yore
vitals is as close to your hide as what you claim," Casey had said
impatiently, "an' you don't want any punctures in 'em, git to work an'
git that hide of yourn outa sight. It'll take some diggin'; they's a
lot of yuh to cover."
Barney, therefore, dug like a badger with a dog snuffing at its tail.
Casey, on the other hand, climbed laboriously in the darkness a bluff
he had not attempted to climb by daylight. It was hard work and slow,
for he felt the need of going quietly. What lay over the rim-rock he
did not know, though he meant to find out.
Daylight found him leaning against a smooth ledge which formed a part
of the black capping he had seen from the road. He had spent the night
toiling over boulders and into small gulches and out again, trying to
find some crevice through which he might climb to the top. Now he was
just about where he had been several hours before, and even Casey Ryan
could not help realizing what a fine target he would make if he
attempted to climb back down the bluff to camp before darkness again
hid his movements.
Standing there puffing and wondering what to do next, he saw the two
burros come picking their way toward the spring for their morning drink
and a handful apiece of rolled oats which Barney kept to bait them into
camp. The lead burro was within easy flinging distance of a rock, from
camp, when the thin, unmistakable crack of a rifle-shot came from the
right, high up on the rim somewhere beyond Casey. The lead burro
pitched forward, struggled to get up, fell again and rolled over,
lodging against a rock with its four feet sticking up at awkward angles
in the air.
The second burro, always quick to take alarm, wheeled and went
galloping away down the draw. But he couldn't outgallop the bullet
that sent him in a complete somersault down the slope. Barney might
keep the rest of his rolled oats, for the burros were through wanting
them.
Casey squinted along the rim of black rock that crested the peak
irregularly like a stiff, ragged frill of mourning stuff the gods had
thrown away. He could not see the man who had shot the burros. By the
intervals between shots, Casey guessed that one man was doing the
shooting, though it was probable there were others in the gang. And now
that the burros were dead, it became more than ever necessary to locate
the gang and have it out with them. That necessity did not worry Casey
in the least. The only thing that troubled him now was getting up on
the rim without being seen.
It was characteristic of Casey Ryan that, though he moved with caution,
he nevertheless moved toward their unseen enemy. Not for a long, long
while had Casey been cautious in his behavior, and the necessity galled
him. If the hidden marksman had missed that last burro, Casey would
probably have taken a longer chance. But to date, every bullet had gone
straight to its destination; which was enough to make any man think
twice.
Once during the forenoon, while Casey was standing against the rim-rock
staring glumly down upon the camp, Barney's hat, perched on a pick
handle, lifted its crown above the edge of his hiding place; an old,
old trick Barney was playing to see if the rifle were still there and
working. The rifle worked very well indeed, for Barney was presently
flattened into his retreat, swearing and poking his finger through a
round hole in his hat.
Casey seized the opportunity created by the diversion and scurried like
a lizard across a bare, gravelly slide that had been bothering him for
half an hour. By mid-afternoon he reached a crevice that looked
promising enough when he craned up it, but which nearly broke his neck
when he had climbed halfway up. Never before had he been compelled to
measure so exactly his breadth and thickness. It was drawing matters
down rather fine when he was compelled to back down to where he had
elbow room, and remove his coat before he could squeeze his body
through that crack. But he did it, with his six-shooter inside his
shirt and the extra ammunition weighting his trousers pockets.
In spite of his long experience with desert scenery, Casey was somewhat
astonished to find himself in a new land, fairly level and with thick
groves of pinon cedar and juniper trees scattered here and there. Far
away stood other barren hills with deep canyons between. He knew now
that the black-capped butte was less a butte than the uptilted nose of
a high plateau not half so barren as the lower country. From the
pointing Joshua tree it had seemed a peak, but contours are never so
deceptive as in the high, broken barrens of Nevada.
He looked down into the gulch where Barney was holed up with their
outfit. He could scarcely distinguish the place, it had dwindled so
with the distance. He had small hope of seeing Barney. After that
last leaden bee had buzzed through his hat crown, you would have to dig
faster than Barney if you wanted a look at him. Casey grinned when he
thought of it.
When he had gotten his breath and had scraped some loose dirt out of
his shirt collar, Casey crouched down behind a juniper and examined his
surroundings carefully, his pale, straight-lidded eyes moving slowly as
the white, pointing finger of a searchlight while he took in every
small detail within view. Midway in the arc of his vision was a ledge,
ending in a flat-topped boulder.
The ledge blocked his view, except that he could see trees and a higher
peak of rocks beyond it. He made his way cautiously toward the ledge,
his eyes fixed upon the boulder. A huge, sloping slab of the granite
outcropping it seemed, scaly with gray-green fungus in the cracks where
moisture longest remained; granite ledge banked with low junipers
warped and stunted and tangled with sage. The longer Casey looked at
the boulder, the less he saw that seemed unnatural in a country filled
with boulders and outcroppings and stunted vegetation.
But the longer he looked at it, the stronger grew his animal instinct
that something was wrong. He waited for a time--a long time indeed for
Casey Ryan to wait. There was no stir anywhere save the sweep of the
wind blowing steadily from the west.
He crept forward, halting often, eyeing the boulder and its neighboring
ledge, distrust growing within him, though he saw nothing, heard
nothing but the wind sweeping through branches and bush. Casey Ryan
was never frightened in his life. But he was Irish born--and there's
something in Irish blood that will not out; something that goes beyond
reason into the world of unknown wisdom.
It's a tricksy world, that realm of intuitions. For this is what
befell Casey Ryan, and you may account for it as best pleases you.
He circled the rock as a wolf will circle a coiled rattler which it
does not see. Beyond the rock, built close against it so that the rear
wall must have been the face of the ledge, a little rock cabin squatted
secretively. One small window, with two panes of glass was set high
under the eaves on the side toward Casey. Cleverly concealed it was,
built to resemble the ledge. Visible from one side only, and that was
the side where Casey stood. At the back the sloping boulder, untouched,
impregnable; at the north and west, a twist of the ledge that hid the
cabin completely in a niche. It was the window on the south side that
betrayed it.
So here was what the boulder concealed,--and yet, Casey was not
satisfied with the discovery. Unconsciously he reached for his gun.
This, he told himself, must be the secret habitation of the fiend who
shot from rim-rocks with terrible precision at harmless prospectors and
their burros.
Casey squinted up at the sun and turned his level gaze again upon the
cabin. Reason told him that the man with the rifle was still watching
for a pot shot at him and Barney, and that there was nothing whatever
to indicate the presence of only one man in the camp below. Had he been
glimpsed once during the climb, he would have been fired upon; he would
never have been given the chance to gain the top and find this cabin.
The place looked deserted. His practical, everyday mind told him it
was empty for the time being. But he felt queer and uncomfortable,
nevertheless. He sneaked along the ledge to the cabin, flattened
himself against the corner next the gray boulder and waited there for a
minute. He felt the flesh stiffening on his jaws as he crept up to the
window to look in. By standing on his toes, Casey's eyes came on a
level with the lowest inch of glass,--the window was so high.
Just at first Casey could not see much. Then, when his eyes had
adjusted themselves to the half twilight within, his mind at first
failed to grasp what he saw. Gradually a dimly sensed dread took hold
of him, and grew while he stood there peering in at commonplace things
which should have given him no feeling save perhaps a faint surprise.
A fairly clean, tiny room he saw, with a rough, narrow bed in one
corner and a box table at its head. From the ceiling hung a lantern
with the chimney smoked on one side and the warped, pole rafter above
it slightly blackened to show how long the lantern had hung there
lighted. A door opposite the tiny window was closed, and there was no
latch or fastening on the inner side. An Indian blanket covered half
the floor space, and in the corner opposite the bed was a queer,
drumlike thing of sheet iron with a pipe running through the wall; some
heating arrangement, Casey guessed.
In the center of the room, facing the window, a woman sat in a wooden
rocking chair and rocked. A pale old woman with dark hollows under her
eyes that were fixed upon the pattern of the Indian rug. Her hair was
white. Her thin, white hands rested limply on the arms of the chair,
and she was rocking back and forth, back and forth, steadily,
quietly,--just rocking and staring at the Indian rug.
Casey has since told me that she was the creepiest thing he ever saw in
his life. Yet he could not explain why it was so. The woman's face was
not so old, though it was lined and without color. There was a
terrible quiet in her features, but he felt, somehow, that her thoughts
were not quiet. It was as if her thoughts were reaching out to him,
telling him things too awful for her thin, hushed lips to let pass.
But after all, Casey's main object was to locate the man with the
rifle, and to do it before he himself was seen on the butte. He
watched a little longer the woman who rocked and rocked. Never once did
her eyes move from that fixed point on the rug. Never once did her
fingers move on the arm of the chair. Her mouth remained immobile as
the lips of a dead woman. He had to force himself to leave the window;
and when he did, he felt guilty, as if he had somehow deserted some one
helpless and needing him. He sneaked back, lifted himself and took
another long look. The old woman was rocking back and forth, her face
quiet with that terrible, pent placidity which Casey could not
understand.
Away from the cabin a pebble's throw, he shook his shoulders and pulled
his mind away from her, back to the man with the rifle--and to Barney.
Rocking in a chair never hurt anybody that he ever heard of. And
shooting from rim-rocks did. And Barney was down there, holed up and
helpless, though he had grub and water. Casey was up here in a mighty
dangerous place without much grub or water but--he hoped--not quite
helpless. His immediate, pressing job was not to peek through a
high-up window at an old woman rocking back and forth in a chair, but
to round up the man who was interfering with Casey's peaceful quest
for--well, he called it wealth; but I think that adventure meant more
to him.
He picked his way carefully along the edge of the rim-rock, keeping
under cover when he could and watching always the country ahead. And
without any artful description of his progress, I will simply say that
Casey Ryan combed the edge of that rampart for two miles before dark,
and found himself at last on the side farthest from Barney without
having discovered the faintest trace of any living soul save the woman
who rocked back and forth in the little, secret cabin.
Casey sat down on a rock, took a restrained drink from his canteen, and
said everything he knew or could invent that was profane and
condemnatory of his luck, of the unseen assassin, of the country and
his present predicament. He got up, looked all around him, sniffed
unavailingly for some tang of smoke in the thin, crisp air, reseated
himself and said everything all over again.
Presently he rose and made his way straight across the butte, going
slowly to lessen his chance of making a noise for unfriendly ears to
hear, and with the stars for guidance.
CHAPTER FOUR
The night was growing cold, and Casey had no coat. At least he could
go down and tell Barney what he had discovered and had failed to
discover, and get something to eat. Barney would probably be worrying
about him, though there was a chance that a bullet had found Barney
before dark. Casey was uneasy, and once he was down the fissure again,
he hurried as much as possible.
He managed to reach the camp by the little spring without being shot at
and without breaking a leg. But Barney was not there. Just at first
Casey believed he was dead; but a brief search told Casey that two of
the largest canteens were gone, together with a side of bacon, some
flour and all of the tobacco. White assassins would have made a more
thorough job of robbing the camp. Barney, it was evident, had fled the
fate of the burros.
Casey told the stars what he thought of a partner like Barney.
Afterward he ate what was easiest to swallow without cooking,
overhauled what was left of their outfit, cached the remainder in a
clump of bushes, and wearily climbed the bluff again under a capacity
load. He concealed himself in the bottom of the fissure to sleep,
since he could search no farther.
If he thought wistfully of the palled comfort of his apartment in Los
Angeles, and of the Little Woman there, he still did not think strongly
enough to send him back to them. For with a canteen or two of water,
some food and his two capable legs to carry him, Casey Ryan could have
made it to Barstow easily enough. But because he was Casey Ryan, and
Irish, and because he was always on the hunt for trouble without
recognizing it when he met it in the trail, it never occurred to him to
follow Barney down to safer country.
"That there Joshuay tree meant a lot more'n what it let on, pointin' up
this way!" Casey muttered, staring down upon a somnolent wilderness
blanketed with hushed midnight. "If it thinks it's got Casey whipped,
it better think agin and think quick. I'll give it somethin' to point
at, 'fore I leave this here butte.
"Funny, the way it kept pointin' up this way. I've saw Joshuays
before--miles of 'em. But I never seen one that looked so kinda human
and so kinda like it was tryin' to talk. Seems kinda funny; an' that
old lady rockin' an' lookin'--seems like her an' the Joshuay has kinda
throwed in together, hopin' somebody might come along with savvy enough
to kinda--aw, hell!" So did Casey and his Irish belief in the
supernatural fall plump against the limitations of his vocabulary.
Against the limitations proscribed by his material predicament,
however, Casey Ryan set his face with a grin. Somebody was going to
get the big jolt of his life before long, he told himself over a
careful breakfast fire built cunningly far back in the crevice where a
current of air sucked into the rock capping of the butte. Something was
going on up here that shouldn't go on. He did not know what it was,
but he meant to stop it. He did not know who was making Indian war on
peaceful prospectors, but Casey felt that they were already as good as
licked, since he was here with breakfast under his belt and his
six-shooter tucked handily inside his waistband.
He squinted up the crack in the ledge, made certain mental alterations
in its narrow, jagged walls, and reached for the tough-handled,
efficient prospector's pick he had thoughtfully included in his meagre
equipment. Slowly and methodically he worked up the crevice, knocking
off certain sharp points of rock, and knowing all the while what would
probably happen to him if he were overheard.
He was not discovered, however. When he laid elbows on the upper level
of the rim and pulled himself up, his coat was on his back where it
belonged, and even Barney could have followed him. Yet the top showed
no evidence of a widening of the fissure. The bushy junipers hid him
completely while he reconnoitred and considered what he should do.
Because the place was close and the invisible call was strong, Casey
went first to the rock hut, circled it carefully and found that it was
exactly what it had seemed at first sight; a hidden place with no
evident opening save that high, small window under the eaves. There
was no sign of pathway leading to it, no trace of life outside its
wall. But when he crept close and peeked in again, there sat the old
woman rocking back and forth. But to-day she stared at the wall before
her.
Casey felt a distinct sensation of relief just in knowing that she was,
after all, capable of moving. Now her head was not bent, but rested
against the back of her chair. She was rocking steadily, quietly, with
never a halt.
Casey rapped on the window and waited, fighting a nameless dread of the
mystery of her. But she continued to rock and to stare at the wall; if
she heard the tapping she gave no sign whatever. So presently he turned
away and set himself to the work of finding the man with the rifle.
To that end he first of all climbed the tallest pinon tree in sight; a
tree that stood on a rise of ground apart from its brothers. From the
concealment of its branches, he surveyed his surroundings carefully,
noting especially the notched unevenness of the butte's rim and how
just behind him it narrowed unexpectedly to a thin ridge not more than
a couple of hundred yards in breadth. A jagged outcropping cut
straight across and Casey saw how yesterday he had mistaken that ledge
for the rim of the butte. His man must have been out on the point
beyond him all the while. He was out there now, very likely; there, or
down in the camp he had watched yesterday like a vulture.
His search having narrowed to an area easily covered in an hour or two,
Casey turned his head and examined as well as he could the deep canyon
that had bitten into the butte and caused that narrow peak. Trees
blocked his view there, and he was feeling about for a lower foothold
so that he could make the descent when a voice from the ground startled
him considerably.
"Come down outa there, before I shoot yuh down!"
Casey looked down and saw what he afterwards declared was the meanest
looking man on earth, pointing straight at him the widest muzzled
shotgun he had ever seen in his life.
Casey came down. The last ten feet of the distance he made in a clean
jump, planting his feet full in the old man's stomach. The meanest
looking man on earth gave a grunt and crumpled, with Casey's fingers
digging into his throat.
Whether Casey would have killed him or not will never be known. For
just as the man was falling limp in his hands, another heavy body
landed upon Casey's back. Casey felt a hard, chill circle pressed
against his perspiring temple. His hands relaxed and fall away from
the throat, leaving finger marks there in the flesh.
"Git up off'n him!" a new voice commanded harshly, and Casey obeyed.
His captor shifted the gun muzzle to the back of Casey's neck and poked
the gasping, bearded old man with his toe.
"Git up, Paw, you old fool, you! What'd you let 'im light on yuh fer?
Why couldn't you a stood back a piece, outa reach? You like to got
croaked."
Casey found it prudent to hold his head rather still, as a man does
when he carries a boil on his neck. The muzzle of a six-shooter has a
quieting effect, when applied to the person by an unfriendly hand.
Casey did not at once see the intruder. But presently "Paw" recovered
himself and his shotgun, and swung it menacingly toward Casey.
Whereupon the cold circle left Casey's medulla oblongata and a
long-faced, long-legged youth stepped somewhat hastily to one side.
"Paw, you ol' fool, you, get your finger off'n that trigger whilst
you're aimin' at me!" he exclaimed pettishly.
"I wa'n't aimin' at you. I was aimin' at this 'ere--" Casey heard
himself called many names, any one of which was good for a fight when
Casey was free.
"Aw, you shut up, Paw. You ain't gittin' nobody nowhere," the son
interrupted. "You can't cuss 'im t' death--he looks like he could cut
loose a few of them pet names hisself if he got a chancet. Yuh might
tell us what you was doin' up that there tree, mister. An' what you're
doin' on this here butte, anyhow."
Casey looked at him. Knowing Casey, I should say that his eyes were
not pleasant. "Talk to Paw," he advised contemptuously. "The two of
yuh may possibly be able to stand each other without gittin' sick; but
me, I never did git used to skunks!"
That remark very nearly got him a through ticket to Land Beyond. But,
being very nearly what Casey had called them, they contented themselves
with mouthing vile epithets.
"Better take 'im down to the mine an' keep 'im till Mart gets back,
Paw," the long-jawed youth suggested, when he ran short of
objurgations. "Mart'll fix 'im when he comes."
"I'd fix 'im, here an', now," threatened Paw, "but Mart, he's so damned
techy lately--what we oughta do is bust 'is head with a rock an' pitch
'im over the rim. That'd fix 'im."
They wrangled over the suggestion, and finally decided to take him down
and turn him over to one whom they called Joe. Casey went along
peaceably, hopeful that he would later have a chance to fight back. He
told himself that they both had heads like peanuts, and whenever they
moved, he swore, he could hear their brains rattle in their skulls. It
doesn't take brains to shoot straight, and he decided that the lanky
young man was the one who had shot from the rim-rock. They drove him
down into the narrow, deep gulch, following a steep trail that Casey
had not seen the day before. The trail led them to the mouth of a
tunnel; and by the size of the dump Casey judged that the workings were
of a considerable extent. They were getting out silver ore, he
guessed, after a glance or two at stray pieces of rock.
Joe was a big, glum-looking individual with his left hand bandaged. He
chewed tobacco industriously and maintained a complete silence while
Hank, frequently telling Paw to shut up, told how and where they had
found Casey spying up on the butte.
"We don't fancy stray desert rats prowlin' around without no reason,"
said Joe. "Our boss that we're workin' for ain't at home. We're
lookin' for 'im back any day now, an' we'll just hold yuh till he
comes. He can do as he likes about yuh. You'll have to work fer your
board--c'm on an' I'll show yuh how."
Hank followed Casey and Joe into the tunnel. Casey made no objections
whatever to going. The tunnel was a fairly long one, he noticed, with
drifts opening out of it to left and right. At the end of the main
tunnel, Joe turned, took Casey's candle from him and stuck it into a
seam in the wall, as he had done with his own.
"Ever drill in rock?" he asked shortly.
"Mebbe I have an' mebbe I ain't," Casey returned defiantly.
"Here's a drill, an' here's your single-jack. Now git t' work. There
ain't any loafin' around this camp, and spies never meant good to
nobody. Yuh needn't expect to be popular with us--but you'll git your
grub if yuh earn it."
Casey looked at the drill, took the double-headed, four-pound hammer
and hesitated. He has said that it was pretty hard to resist braining
the two of them at once. But there would still be the old man with the
shotgun, and he admitted that he was curious about the old woman who
rocked and rocked. He decided to wait awhile and see, why these miners
found it necessary to shoot harmless prospectors who came near the
butte. So he spat into the dust of the tunnel floor, squinted at Joe
for a minute and went to work.
That day Casey was kept underground except during the short interval of
"shooting" and waiting for the dynamite smoke to clear out of the
tunnel; which process Casey assisted by operating a hand blower much
against his will. Joe remained always on guard, eyeing Casey
suspiciously. When at last he was permitted to pick up his coat and
leave the tunnel, night had fallen so that the gulch was dim and
shadowy. Casey was conducted to a dugout cabin where bacon was frying
too fast and smoking suffocatingly. Paw was there, in a vile temper
which seemed to be directed toward the three impartially and to have
been caused chiefly by his temporary occupation as camp cook.
Casey watched the old man place food for one person in little dishes
which he set in a bake pan for want of a tray. He added a small tin
teapot of tea and disappeared from the dugout.
"Two of us waitin' to see your boss, huh?" Casey inquired boldly of
Joe. "Can't we eat together?"
"You can call yourself lucky if you eat at all," Joe retorted glumly.
"The old man's pretty sore at the way you handled him. He's runnin'
this camp; I ain't."
Casey let it go at that, chiefly because he was hungry and tired and
did not want to risk losing his supper altogether. Hounds like these,
he told himself bitterly, were capable of any crime--from smashing a
man's skull and throwing him off the rim-rock to starving him to death.
He was Casey Ryan, ready always to fight whether his chance of winning
was even or merely microscopical; but even so, Casey was not inclined
toward suicide.
When the old man presently returned and the three sat down to the
table, Casey obeyed a gesture and sat down with them. In spite of
Joe's six-shooter laid handily upon the table beside his plate, Casey
ate heartily, though the food was neither well cooked nor over
plentiful.
After supper he rose and filled his pipe which they had permitted him
to keep. A stranger coming into the cabin might not have guessed that
Casey was a prisoner. When the table was cleared and Hank set about
washing the dishes, Casey picked up a grimy dish towel branded black in
places where it had rubbed sooty kettles, and grinned cheerfully at Paw
while he dried a tin plate. Paw eyed him dubiously over a stinking
pipe, spat reflectively into the woodbox and crossed his legs the other
way, loosely swinging an ill-shod foot.
"Y'ain't told us yet what brung yuh up on the butte," Paw observed
suddenly. "Yuh wa'n't lost--yuh ain't got the mark uh no tenderfoot.
What was yuh doin' up in that tree?"
"Mebbe I mighta been huntin' mountain sheep," Casey retorted calmly.
"Huntin' mountain sheep up a tree is a new one," tittered Hank. "Wish
you'd give me a swaller uh that brand. Must have a kick like a brindle
mule."
"More likely 'White Mule.'" Casey cocked a knowing eye at Hank. "You're
too late, young feller. I chewed the cork day before yesterday," he
declared.
While he fished another plate out of the pan, Casey observed that Paw
looked at Joe inquiringly, and that Joe moved his head sidewise a
careful inch, and back again.
"Moonshine, huh?" Paw hazarded hopefully. "Yuh peddlin' it, er makin'
it?"
Casey grinned secretively. "A man can't be pinched without the goods,"
he observed shrewdly. "I was raised in a country where they took fools
out an' brained 'em with an axe. You fellers ain't been none too
friendly, recollect. When's your boss expected home, did yuh say? I'd
kinda like to meet 'im."
"He'll kinda like to meet you," Joe returned darkly. "Your actions has
been plumb suspicious.
"Nothin' suspicious about MY actions," Casey stated truculently,
throwing discretion behind him. "The suspiciousness lays up here
somewheres on this butte. If yuh want to know what brung me up here,
Casey Ryan's the man that can tell yuh to your faces. I come up here
to find out who's been gittin' busy with a high-power on my camp down
below. Ain't it natural a man'd want to know who'd shot his two
burros--an' 'is pardner?" Casey had impulsively decided to throw in
Barney for good measure. "Casey Ryan ain't the man to set under a bush
an' be shot at like a rabbit. You can ask anybody if Casey ever backed
up fer man er beast. I come up here huntin'. Shore I did. It wasn't
sheep I was after--that there's my mistake. It was goats."
"Guess I got yourn," Hank leered "when stuck my gun in your back hair."
"If any one's 'been usin' a high-power it wasn't on this butte," Joe
growled. "None uh this bunch done any shootin'. Pap an' Hank, they
was up here huntin' burros an I caught yuh up a tree spyin'. We got a
little band uh antelope up here we're pertectin'. Our boss got himself
made a deppity fer just such cases as yourn appears t' be--pervidin'
your case ain't worse.
"Now you say your pardner was shot down below in your camp. That shore
looks bad fer you, old-timer. The boss'll shore have t' look into it
when he gits here. Lucky we made up our minds t' hold yuh--a murderer,
like as not." He filled his pipe with deliberation, while Casey, his
jaw sagging, stared from one to the other.
Casey had meant to accuse them to their faces of shooting Barney and
the burros from the rim-rock. It had occurred to him that if they
believed Barney dead, they might reveal something of their purpose in
the attack. Concealment, he felt vaguely, would serve merely to
sharpen their suspicion of him. It had seemed very important to Casey
that these three should not know that Barney was probably well on his
way to Barstow by now.
Barney in Barstow would mean Barney bearing news that Casey Ryan was
undoubtedly murdered by outlaws in the Panamints; which would mean a
few officers on the trail, with Barney to guide them to the spot. Paw
and Hank and Joe--outlaws all, he would have sworn would get what Casey
called their needin's. His jaw muscles tightened when he thought of
that, and the prospect held him quiet under Joe's injustice.
"I can prove anything I'm asked to prove when the time comes," he said
sourly, and began to roll himself a cigarette, since his pipe had gone
out. "But I ain't in any courtroom yet, an' you fellers ain't any
judge an' jury."
"We got to hold ye," Paw spoke up unctiously, as if the decision had
been his. "Ef a crime's been committed, like you say it has, we got to
do our duty an' hold ye. The boss'll know what to do with ye--like I
said all along; when I hauled ye down outa that tree, for instance.
"Aw, shut up, Paw, you ol' fool, you," Hank commanded again with filial
gentleness. "He had yore tongue hangin' out a foot when I come along
an' captured 'im. Don't go takin' no credit to yourself--you ain't got
none comin'. Mart'll know what to do with 'im, all right. But yuh
needn't go an' try to let on to Mart that you was the one that caught
'im. He had you caught. An' he'd a killed yuh if I hadn't showed up
an' pulled 'im off'n yuh."
"Well now, when it comes to KILLIN'," Casey interjected spitefully, "I
guess I coulda put the two of yuh away if I'd a wanted to right bad.
Casey Ryan ain't no killer, because he don't have to be. G'wan an'
hold me if yuh feel that way. Grub ain't none too good, but I can
stand it till your boss comes. I want a man-to-man talk with him,
anyway."
CHAPTER FIVE
That night Casey slept soundly in a bunk built above Joe's bed in the
dugout, with Hank and Paw on the opposite side of the room with their
guns handy. In the morning he thought well enough of his stomach to
get up and start breakfast when Hank had built the fire. He was aware
of Joe's suspicious gaze from the lower bunk, and of the close presence
of Joe's six-shooter eyeing him balefully from underneath the top
blanket. Hank, too, was watchful as a coyote, which he much resembled,
in Casey's opinion. But Casey did not mind trifles of that kind, once
his mind was at ease about the breakfast and he was free to slice bacon
the right thickness, and mix the hot-cake batter himself. For the first
time in many weeks he sang--if you could call it singing--over his work.
When Casey Ryan sings over a breakfast fire, you may expect the bacon
fried exactly right. You may be sure the hot-cakes will be browned
correctly with no uncooked dough inside, and that the coffee will give
you heart for whatever hardship the day may hold.
Even Paw's surliness lightened a bit by the time he had speared his
tenth cake and walloped it in the bacon grease before sprinkling it
thick with sugar and settling the eleventh cake on top. Casey was
eyeing the fourteenth cake on Hank's plate when Joe looked up at him
over a loaded fork.
"Save out enough dough for three good uns," Joe ordered, "an' fill that
little coffee pot an' set it to keep hot, before Hank hogs the hull
thing. Dad, seems like you're, too busy t' think uh some things Mart
wouldn't want forgot." Paw looked quickly at Casey; but Casey Ryan had
played poker all his life, and his weathered face showed no expression
beyond a momentary interest, which was natural.
"Other feller hurt bad?" he inquired carelessly, looking at Joe's
bandaged hand. He almost grinned when he saw the relieved glances
exchanged between Joe and Paw.
"Leg broke," Joe mumbled over a mouthful. "Dad, he set it an' it's
doin' all right. He's up in another cabin." Through Hank's brainless
titter, Joe added carefully, "Bad ground in the first right-hand drift.
We had to abandon it. Rocks big as your head comin' in on yuh
onexpected. None uh them right-hand drifts is safe fer a man t' walk
in, much less work."
Thereupon Casey related a thrilling story of a cave-in, and assured Joe
that he and his partner were lucky to get off with mere broken bones.
Casey, you will observe, was running contrary to his nature and leaning
to diplomacy.
For himself, I am sure he would never have troubled to placate them. He
would have taken the first slim chance that offered--or made one--and
fought the three to a finish.
But there was the old woman in the rock hut above them, rocking back
and forth and staring at a wall that had no visible opening save one
small window to let in the light of outdoors. Prisoner she must
be--though why, Casey could only guess.
Perhaps she was some desert woman, the widow of some miner who had been
shot as these three had tried to shoot him and Barney Oakes. Mean,
malevolent as they were, they would still lack the brutishness
necessary to shoot an old woman. So they had shut her up there in the
rock hut, not daring to take her back to civilization where she would
tell of the crime. It was all plain enough to Casey. The story of the
crippled miner made him curl his lip contemptuously when his back was
safely turned from Joe.
That day Casey thought much of the old woman in the hut, and of Paw's
worse than inferior cooking. Though he did not realize the change in
himself, six months of close companionship with the Little Woman had
changed Casey Ryan considerably. Time was when even his
soft-heartedness would not have impelled him to patient scheming that
he might help an old woman whose sole claim upon his sympathy consisted
of four rock walls and a look of calm despair in her eyes. Now, Casey
was thinking and planning for the old woman more than for himself.
Wherefore, Casey chose the time when he was "putting in an upper"
(which is miner's parlance for drilling a hole in the upper face of the
tunnel). He gritted his teeth when he swung back the single-jack and
landed a glancing blow on the knuckles of his left hand instead of the
drill end. No man save Casey Ryan or a surgeon could have told
positively whether the metacarpal bones were broken or whether the hand
was merely skinned and bruised.
Joe came up, regarded the bleeding hand sourly, led Casey out to the
dugout and bandaged the hand for him. There would be no more tunnel
work for Casey until the hand had healed; that was accepted without
comment.
That night Casey proved to Paw that, with one hand in a sling much
resembling Joe's, he could nevertheless cook a meal that made eating a
pleasure to look forward to. After that the old woman in the little
stone hut had pudding, sometimes, and cake made without eggs, and pie;
and the potatoes were mashed or baked instead of plain boiled. Casey
had the satisfaction of seeing the dishes return empty to the dugout,
and know that he was permitted to add something to her comfort and
well-being. The Little Woman would be glad of that, Casey thought with
a glow. She might never hear of it, but Casey liked to feel that he
was doing something that would please the Little Woman.
For the first few days after Casey was installed as cook, one of the
three remained always with him, making it plain that he was under
guard. Two were always busy elsewhere. Casey saw that he was expected
to believe that they were at work in the tunnel, driving it in to a
certain contact of which they spoke frequently and at length.
At supper they would mention their footage for that day's work, and
Casey would hide a grin of derision. Casey knew rock as he knew bacon
and beans and his sour-dough can. To make the footage they claimed to
be making in that tunnel, they would need to shoot twice a day, with a
round of, say, five holes to a shot.
As a matter of fact, two holes a day, one shot at noon and one at
night, were the most Casey ever heard fired in the tunnel or elsewhere
about the mine. But he did not tell them any of the things he thought;
not even Joe, who had intelligence far above Paw and Hank, ever guessed
that Casey listened every day for their shots and could tell, almost to
an inch what progress they were actually making in the tunnel. Nor did
he guess that Casey Ryan with his mouth shut was more unsafe than
"giant powder" laid out in the sun until it sweated destruction.
Persistent effort, directed by an idea based solely upon an abstract
theory, must be driven by a trained intelligence. In this case the
abstract theory that every prisoner must be watched must support itself
unaided by Casey's behavior. Not even Joe's intelligence was trained
to a degree where the theory in itself was sufficient to hold him to
the continuous effort of watching Casey.
Wherefore Paw, Hank and Joe presently slipped into the habit of leaving
Casey alone for an hour or so; being careful to keep the guns out of
his reach, and returning to the dugout at unexpected intervals to make
sure that all was well.
Casey Ryan knew his pots and pans, and how to make them fill his days
if need be. With savory suppers and his care-free, Casey Ryan grin, he
presently lulled them into accepting him as a handy man around camp,
and into forgetting that he was at least a potential enemy. Afoot and
alone in that unfriendly land, with his left hand smashed and carried
in a sling, and on his tongue an Irish joke that implied content with
his captivity, Casey Ryan would not have looked dangerous to more
intelligent men than these three.
They should have looked one night under the bedding in Casey's bunk.
More important still would have been the safeguarding of their "giant
powder" and caps and fuse. They should not have left it in a gouged,
open hollow under a boulder near the dugout. They were not burdened by
the weight of their brains, I imagine.
Just here I should like to say a few words to those who are wholly
ignorant of the devastating power contained in "giant powder"--which is
dynamite. If you have never had any experience with the stuff, you are
likely to go out with a bang and a puff of bluish-brown smoke when you
go. On the other hand, you may believe the weird tales one reads now
and then, of how whole mountainsides have been thrown down by the
discharge of a few sticks of dynamite. Or of one man striking terror
to the very souls of a group of mutinous miners by threatening to throw
a piece at them. Very well, now this is the truth without any frills
of exaggeration or any belittlement:
Dynamite MAY go off by being thrown so that it lands with a jar, but it
is not likely to be so hasty as all that. Whole boxes of it have been
dropped off wagons traveling over rough trails, with no worse effect
than a nervous chill down the spine of the driver of the wagon. It is
true that old stuff, after lying around for months and months through
varying degrees of temperature, may perform erratically, exploding when
it shouldn't and refusing to explode when it should. The average miner
refuses to take a chance with stale "giant" if he can get hold of fresh.
One stick the size of an ordinary candle, and from that to a maximum
amount of four sticks, may be used to "load" a hole eighteen to
twenty-four inches long, drilled into living rock. The amount of
dynamite used depends upon the quality of rock to be broken and the
skill and good judgment of the miner. In average hard-rock mining,
from three to five of these holes are drilled in a space four-by-six
feet in area.
A stick of dynamite is exploded by inserting in one end of the stick a
high-power detonating cap which will deliver a twenty-pound blow per
X--whatever that means. From three- to six-X caps are used in ordinary
mining. Three-X caps sometimes fail to explode a stick of dynamite. A
six-X cap, delivering a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound blow, may be
counted upon to do the work without fail.
The cap itself is exploded by a spark running through a length of fuse,
the length depending altogether upon the time required to reach a point
of safety after the fuse is lighted. The cap is really more dangerous
to handle than is the dynamite itself. The cap is a tricky thing that
may go off at any jar or scratch or at a spark from pipe or cigarette.
You can, if you are sufficiently careless of possible results, light
the twisted paper end of a stick of dynamite and watch the dynamite
burn like wax in your fingers; it MAY go off and set your friends to
work retrieving portions of your body. More likely, it will do nothing
but burn harmlessly.
Well, then, a piece of fuse is inserted in the open end of the cap, and
the metal pressed tight against the fuse to hold it in place. Pressed
down by the miner's teeth, sometimes, if he has been long in the
business and has grown careless about his head; otherwise he crimps the
cap on with a small pair of pliers or the back of his knife blade--and
feels a bit easier when it is done without losing a hand.
You would think, unless you are accustomed to the stuff, that when five
holes are loaded with, probably, ten or twelve sticks of dynamite to
the lot, each hole containing a six-X exploding cap as well, that the
first shot would likewise be the last shot and that the whole tunnel
would cave in and the mountain behind it would shake. Nothing like that
occurs. If there are five loaded holes in the tunnel face, and you do
not hear, one after the other, five muffled BOOMS, you will know that
one hole failed to go off--and that the miner is worried. It happens
sometimes that four holes loaded with eight sticks of dynamite explode
within a foot or so of the fifth hole and yet the fifth hole remains
"dead" and a menace to the miner until it is discharged.
So please don't swallow those wild tales of a stick of dynamite that
threw down a mountainside. I once read a story--it was not so long
ago--of a Chinaman who wiped out a mine with a little piece of dynamite
which he carried in his pocket. I laughed.
Casey Ryan, on the first day when he was left alone with his crippled
hand and his pots and pans for company, did nothing whatever that he
would not have done had one of the three been present. He was
suspicious of their going and thought it was a trap set to catch him in
an attempted escape.
On the second day when the three went off together and left him alone,
Casey went out gathering wood and discovered just where the "powder,"
fuse and caps were kept under a huge, black boulder between the tunnel
portal and the dugout. On the third day he also gathered wood and
helped himself to two sticks of dynamite, three caps and eighteen
inches of fuse. Not enough to be missed unless they checked their
supply more carefully than Casey believed they did; but enough for
Casey's purpose nevertheless.
That night, while the moon shone in through the dingy window at the
head of his bunk and gave him a little light to work by, Casey sat up
in bed and snored softly and with a soothing rhythm while he cut a
stick of dynamite in two, capped five inches of fuse for each piece
working awkwardly with his one good hand and pinching the caps tight
with his teeth, which might have sent him with a bang into Kingdom
Come--and very carefully worked the caps into the powder until no more
than three inches of fuse protruded from the end of the half stick. It
would have been less dangerous to land with a yell in the middle of the
floor and fight the three men with one bare hand, but Casey's courage
never turned a hair.
Still snoring mildly, he held up to the moonlight two deadly weapons
and surveyed them with much satisfaction. They would not be so quick,
as fiction would have them, but if his aim was accurate in throwing,
they would be deadly enough. Moreover, he could count with a good deal
of certainty upon a certain degree of terror which the sight of them in
his hand would produce.
When Casey Ryan cooked breakfast next morning, he carried two
half-sticks of loaded dynamite under his hand in the sling. Can you
wonder that even he shied at standing over the stove cooking hot cakes
and complained that his broken hand pained him a lot and that the heat
made it worse? But a shrewd observer would have noticed on his face
the expression of a cat that has been shut in the pantry over night.
Joe volunteered to take another look at the hand and see if blood
poison was "setting in"; but Casey said it didn't feel like blood
poison. He had knocked it against the bunk edge in his sleep, he
declared. He'd dose 'er with iodine after a while, and she'd be all
right.
Joe let it go at that, being preoccupied with other matters at which
Casey could only guess. He conferred with Paw outside the dugout after
breakfast, called Hank away from the dish-washing and the three set off
toward the tunnel with a brisker air than usually accompanied them to
work. Casey watched them go and felt reasonably sure of at least two
hours to himself.
The first thing Casey did after he had made sure that he was actually
alone was to remove the deadly stuff from the sling and lay it on a
shadowed shelf where it would be safe but convenient to his hand. Then,
going to his bunk, he reached under the blankets and found the other
stick of dynamite which he had not yet loaded. This he laid on the
kitchen table and cut it in two as he had done last night with the
other stick. With his remaining cap he loaded a half and carried it
back to his bunk. He was debating in his mind whether it was worth
while purloining another cap from a box under the boulder when another
fancy took him and set him grinning.
Four separate charges of dynamite, he reasoned, would not be necessary.
It was an even chance that the sight of a piece with the fuse in his
hand would be sufficient to tame Paw or Hank or Joe--or the three
together, for that matter--without going further than to give them a
sight of it.
With that idea uppermost, Casey split the paper carefully down the side
of the remaining half-stick, took out the contents in a tin plate and
carried it outside where he buried it in the sand beneath a bush.
Returning to the dugout he made a thick dough of leftover pancake
batter and molded it into the dynamite wrapping with a fragment of
harmless fuse protruding from the opened end. When the thing was dry,
Casey thought it would look very deadly and might be useful. After
several days of helplessness for want of a weapon, Casey was in a mood
to supply himself generously.
He finished the dish-washing, working awkwardly with one hand. After
that he put a kettle of beans on to boil, filled the stove with pinon
sticks and closed the drafts. He armed himself with the two loaded
pieces of dynamite from the cupboard, filled his pockets with such
other things as he thought he might need, and went prospecting on his
own account.
At the portal of the tunnel he stopped and listened for the ping-g,
ping-g of a single-jack striking steadily upon steel. But the tunnel
was silent, the ore car uptilted at the end of its track on the dump.
Yet the three men were supposedly at work in the mine, had talked at
breakfast about wanting to show a certain footage when the boss
returned, and of needing to hurry.
Casey went into the tunnel, listening and going silently; sounds travel
far in underground workings. At the mouth of the first right-hand
drift he stopped again and listened. This, if he would believe Joe,
was the drift where the bad ground had caused the accident to Joe and
his partner whose leg had been broken. Casey found the drift as silent
as the main tunnel. He went in ten feet or so and lighted the candle
he had pulled from inside his shirt. With the candle held in the
swollen fingers of his injured hand, and a prospector's pick taken from
the portal in his other, Casey went on cautiously, keeping an eye upon
the roof which, to his wise, squinting eyes, looked perfectly solid and
safe.
If a track had ever been laid in this drift it had long since been
removed. But a well-defined path led along its center with boot tracks
going and coming, blurring one another with much passing. Casey grinned
and went on, his ears cocked for any sound before or behind, his shoes
slung over his arm by their tied laces.
So he came, in the course of a hundred feet or so, to a crude door of
split cedar slabs, the fastening padlocked on his side. Casey had
vaguely expected some such bar to his path, and he merely gave a grunt
of satisfaction that the lock was old and on his side of the door.
With his jackknife Casey speedily took off one side of the lock and
opened it. Making the door appear locked behind him when he had passed
through was a different matter, and Casey did not attempt it. Instead,
he merely closed the door behind him, carrying the padlock in with him.
As Casey reviewed his situation, being on the butte at all was a risk
in itself. One detail more or less could not matter so much. Besides,
he was a bold Casey Ryan with two loaded half-sticks of dynamite in his
sling.
A crude ladder against the wall of a roomy stope beyond the door did
not in the least surprise him. He had expected something of this sort.
When he had topped the ladder and found himself in a chamber that
stretched away into blackness, he grunted again his mental confirmation
of a theory working out beautifully in fact. His candle held close to
the wall, he moved forward along the well-trodden path, looking for a
door. Mechanically he noticed also the formation of the wall and the
vein of ore--probably high-grade in pockets, at least--that had caused
this chamber to be dug. The ore, he judged, had long since been taken
out and down through the stope into the tunnel and so out through the
main portal. These workings were old and for mining purposes abandoned.
But just now Casey was absorbed in solving the one angle of the mystery
which he had stumbled upon at first, and he gave no more than a glance
and a thought to the silent testimony of the rock walls.
He found the door, fastened also on the outside just as he had expected
it would be. Beside it stood a rather clever heating apparatus which
Casey did not examine in detail. His Irish heart was beating rather
fast while he unfastened the door. Beyond that door his thoughts went
questing eagerly but he hesitated nevertheless before he lifted his
knuckles and rapped.
There was no reply. Casey waited a minute, knocked again, then pulled
the door open a crack and looked in. The old woman sat there rocking
back and forth, steadily, quietly. But her thin fingers were rolling a
corner of her apron hem painstakingly, as if she meant to hem it again.
Her eyes were fixed absently upon the futile task. Casey watched her
as long as he dared and cleared his throat twice in the hope that she
would notice him. But the old woman rocked back and forth and rolled
her apron hem; unrolled it and carefully rolled it again.
"Good morning, ma'am," said Casey, clearing his throat for the third
time and coming a step into the room with his candle dripping wax on
the floor.
For just an instant the uneasy fingers paused in their rolling of the
apron hem. For just so long the rockers hesitated in their motion.
But the old woman did not reply nor turn her face toward him; and Casey
pushed the door shut behind him and took two more steps toward her.
"I come to see if yuh needed anything, ma'am; a friend, mebbe." Casey
grinned amiably, wanting to reassure her if it were possible to make
her aware of his presence. "They had yuh locked in, ma'am. That don't
look good to Casey Ryan. If yuh wanta get out--if they got yuh held a
prisoner here, or anything like 'that, you can trust Casey Ryan any old
time. Is--can I do anything for yuh, ma'am?" The old woman dropped her
hands to her lap and held them there, closely clasped. Her head swung
slowly round until she was looking at Casey with that awful, fixed
stare she had heretofore directed at the wall or the floor.
"Tell those hell-hounds they have a thousand years to burn--every one
of them!" she said in a deep, low voice that had in it a singing
resonance like a chant. "Every cat, every rat, every mouse, every
louse, has a thousand year's to burn. Tell Mart the hounds of hell
must burn!" Her voice carried a terrible condemnation far beyond the
meaning of the words themselves. It was as if she were pronouncing the
doom of the whole world. "Every cat, every rat, every mouse, every
louse--"
Casey Ryan's jaw dropped an inch. He backed until he was against the
door. He had to swallow twice before he could find his voice, and
those of you who know Casey Ryan will appreciate that. He waited until
she had finished her declaration.
"No, ma'am, you're wrong. I come up here to see if I could help yuh."
"Hounds of hell--black as the bottomless pit that spewed you forth to
prey upon mankind! The world will have to burn. Tell those hounds of
hell that bay at the gibbous moon the world will have to burn. Every
cat, every rat, every mouse, every louse has a thousand years to burn!"
Casey Ryan, with his mouth half open and his eyes rather wild,
furtively opened the door behind him. Still meeting fixedly the dull
glare of the old woman's eyes, Casey slid out through the door and
fastened it hastily behind him. With an uneasy glance now and then
over his shoulder as if he feared the old woman might be in pursuit of
him, he hurried back down the ladder to the closed door in the drift,
pulled the door shut behind him and put the padlock in place before he
breathed naturally.
He stopped then to put on his shoes, made his way to the drift opening
and listened again for voices or footsteps. When he found the way
clear he hurried out and back to the dugout. The first thing he did
was to fill his pipe and light it. Even then the sonorous voice of the
old woman intoning her dreadful proclamation against the world rang in
his ears and sent occasional ripples of horror down his spine. Seen
through the window, she had looked a sad, lonely old lady who needed
sympathy and help. At closer range she was terrible. Casey was trying
to forget her by busying himself about the stove when Joe walked in
unexpectedly.
Joe stood just inside the door, staring at Casey with a glassy look in
his eyes. Something in Joe's face warned Casey of impending events;
but with that terrible old woman still fresh in his mind, Casey was in
the mood to welcome distraction of any sort. He shifted his hand in
the sling so that his concealed weapons lay more comfortably therein,
secure from detection, and waited.
Joe leaned forward, lifted an arm slowly and aimed a finger at Casey
accusingly.
"Pap says that you're a Federal officer!" he began, waggling his finger
at Casey. "Pap thinks you come here spyin' around t' see what we're up
to on this here butte. Now, you can't pull nothin' like that! You
can't get away with it.
"Hank, he wants t' bump yuh off an' say nothin' to anybody. Now, I
come t' have it out with yuh. If you're a Federal officer we're goin'
t' settle with yuh an' take no chances. Mart, he's more easy-goin' in
some ways, on account of havin' his crazy ol' mother on 'is hands t'
take care of. Mart don't want no killin'--on account of his mother
goin' loony when 'is dad got killed. But Mart ain't here. Pap an'
Hank, they been at me all mornin' t' let 'em bump yuh off.
"But Pap an' Hank, they're drunk, see? I'm the only sober man left on
the job. So I come up here t' settle with yuh myself. Takes a sober
man with a level head t' settle these things. Now, if you come up here
spyin' an' snoopin', you git bumped off an' no argument about it.
Mart's got his mother t' take care of--an' we aim t' pertect Mart. If
you're a Federal officer, I want t' know it here an' now. If yuh
ain't, I want yuh t' sample some uh the out-kickin'est 'White Mule' yuh
ever swallered. Now which are yuh, and what yuh goin' t' do? I want
my answer here an' now, an' no argument an' no foolin'!"
Casey blinked but his mouth widened in a grin. "Me, I never went
lookin' fer nothin, I wouldn't put under my vest, Joe," he declared
convincingly. So that was it! He was thinking against time.
Moonshiners as well as would-be murderers they were--and Joe drunk and
giving them away like a fool. Casey wished that he knew where Hank and
Paw were at this moment. He hoped, too, that Joe was right--that Hank
and Paw were drunk. He'd have the three of them tied in a row before
dark, in any case. The thing to do now was to humor Joe along--leave
it to Casey Ryan!
Joe was uncorking a small, flat bottle of pale liquor. Now he held it
out to Casey. Casey took it, thinking he would pretend to drink, would
urge Joe to take a drink; it would be simple, once he got Joe started.
But Joe had a few ideas of his own concerning the celebration. He
pulled a gun unexpectedly, leaned against the closed door to steady
himself and aimed it full at Casey.
"In just two minutes I'm goin' t' shoot if that there bottle ain't
empty," he stated gravely, nodding his head with intense pride in his
ability to handle the situation. "If you're a Federal officer, yuh
won't dast t' drink. If yuh ain't, you'll be almighty glad to. Anyway,
it'll be settled one way or t'other. Drink 'er down!"
Casey blinked again, but this time he did not grin. He debated swiftly
his chance of scaring Joe with the dynamite before Joe would shoot.
But Joe had his finger crooked with drunken solemnity upon the trigger.
The time for dynamite was not now.
"Pap an' Hank, they lap up anything an' call it good. I claim that's
got a back-action kick to it. Drink 'er down!"
Casey drank 'er down. It was like swallowing flames. It was a
half-pint flask, and it was full when Casey, with Joe's eyes fixed upon
him, tilted it and began to drink. Under Joe's baleful glare Casey
emptied the flask before he stopped.
Joe settled his shoulders comfortably against the doorway and watched
Casey make for the water bucket.
"I claim that's the out-kickin'est stuff that ever was made on Black
Butte. How'd yuh like it?"
"All right," Casey bore witness, keeping his eyes fixed on Joe and the
gun and trying his best to maintain a nonchalant manner. "I'd call it
purty fair hootch."
"It's GOOD hootch!" Joe declared impressively, apparently quite
convinced that Casey was not a Federal officer. "Can yuh feel the
kick'to it?"
Casey backed until he sat on the edge of the table his good right hand
supporting his left elbow outside the sling. He grinned at Joe and
while he still keenly realized that he was playing a part for the sole
purpose of gaining somehow an advantage over Joe, he was conscious of a
slight giddiness. An unprejudiced observer would have noticed that his
grin was not quite the old, Casey Ryan grin. It was a shade foolish.
"Bet your life I can feel the kick!" he agreed, nodding his head. "You
can ask anybody." Then Casey discovered something strange in Joe's
appearance. He lifted his head, held it very still and regarded Joe
attentively.
"Say, Joe, what yuh tryin' to do with that six-gun? Tryin' to write
your name in the air with it?"
Joe looked inquiringly down at the gun, eyeing it as if it were a new
and absolutely unknown object. He satisfied himself apparently beyond
all doubt that the gun was doing nothing it should not do, and finally
turned his attention to Casey sitting on the table and grinning at him
meaninglessly.
"Ain't writin' nothin'," Joe stated solemnly. "It's yore eyes. Gun's
all right--yo'r seein' crooked. It's the hootch. Back-action kick to
it. Ain't that right?"
"That's right," nodded Casey and he added, grinning more foolishly,
"Darn right, that's right! Back-action kick--bet your life."
Joe pushed the gun inside his waistband and crooked his finger at
Casey, beckoning mysteriously. "C'mon an' I'll show yuh how it's
made," he invited with heavy enthusiasm. "Yore a judge uh hootch all
right--I can see that. I'll show yuh how we do it. Best White Mule in
Nevada. Ain't that right? Ain't that the real hootch?"
"'S right, all right," Casey agreed earnestly. "Puttin' the hoot in
hootch--you fellers. You can ask anybody if that ain't right."
Joe laughed hoarsely. "Puttin' the hoot in hootch--that's right. I
knowed you was all right. Didn't I say you was? I told Hank an' Pap
you wasn't no Federal officer. They know it, too. I was foolin' back
there. I knowed you didn't need no gun pulled on yuh t' make yuh put
away the hootch. Lapped it up like a thirsty hound. I knowed yuh
would--I was kiddin' yuh, runnin' that razoo with the gun. Ain't that
right?"
"Darn right, that's right! I knew you was foolin' all along. You knew
Casey Ryan's all right--sure, you knowed it!" Casey laid his good hand
investigatively against his stomach. "Pretty hot hootch--you can ask
anybody if it ain't! Workin' like an air drill a'ready."
He blinked inquisitively at Joe, who stared back inquiringly. "Who's
your friend?" Casey demanded pugnaciously. "He sneaked in on yuh. I
never seen 'im come in."
Joe turned slowly and looked behind him at the blank boards of the
unpainted door. Just as slowly he turned back to Casey. A slow grin
split his leathery face.
"Ain't nobody. It's the hootch. Told yuh, didn't I? Gittin' the best
of yuh, ain't it? C'mon--I'll show yuh how it's made."
"Take a barr'l t' git the besta--Casey Ry'n," Casey boasted, his words
blurring noticeably. "Where's y'r White Mule? Let 'er kick--Casey
Ry'n can lead 'er an' tame 'er--an' make'r eat outa 's hand!"
Following Joe, Casey stepped high over a rock no bigger than his fist.
With a lurch he straightened and tried to pull his muddled wits out of
the fog that was fast enveloping them. Dimly he sensed the importance
of this discovery which Joe had forced upon him. In flashes of normalcy
he knew that he must see all he could of their moonshine operations.
He must let them think he was drunk until he knew all their secrets.
He assured himself vaguely that he must, above all things, keep his
head.
But it was all pretty hazy and rapidly growing hazier. Casey Ryan, you
must know, was not what is informally termed a drinking man. In his
youth he might have been able to handle a sudden half-pint of moonshine
whisky and keep as level a head as he now strove valiantly to retain.
But Casey's later years had been more temperate than most desert men
would believe. Unfortunately virtue is not always it own reward; at
least Casey now found himself the worse for past abstinences.
Joe led him into the tunnel, laughing sardonically because Casey found
it scarcely wide enough for his oscillating progress. They turned into
a drift. Casey did not know which drift it was, though he tried
foggily to remember. He was still, you must know, trying to keep a
level head and gain valuable information for the sheriff who he hoped
would return to the butte with Barney.
Paw and Hank were wrangling somewhere ahead. Casey could hear their
raised voices mingled in a confused rumbling in the pent walls of the
drift. Casey thought they passed through a doorway, and that Joe
closed a heavy door behind them, but he was not sure.
Memory of the old woman intoning her horrible anathema surged back upon
Casey with the closing of the door. The voices of Hank and Paw he now
mistook for the ravings of the woman in the stone hut. Casey balked
there, and would not go on. He did not want to face the old woman
again, and he said so repeatedly--or believed that he did.
Joe caught him by the arm and pulled him forward by main strength. The
voices of Paw and Hank came closer and clarified into words; or did
Casey and Joe walk farther and come into their presence?
They were all standing together somewhere, in a large, underground
chamber with a hole letting in the sunlight high up on one side. Casey
was positive there was a hole up there, because the sun shone in his
eyes and to avoid it he moved aside and fell over a bucket or a keg or
something. Hank laughed loudly at the spectacle, and Paw swore because
the fall startled him; but it was Joe who helped Casey up.
Casey knew that he was sitting on a barrel--or something--and telling a
funny story. He thought it must be very funny indeed, because every
one was laughing and bending double and slapping legs while he talked.
Casey realized that here at last were men who appreciated Casey Ryan as
he deserved to be appreciated. Tears ran down his own weathered
cheeks--tears of mirth. He had never laughed so much before in all his
life, he thought. Every one, even Paw, who was normally a mean,
cantankerous old cuss, was having the time of his life.
They attempted to show Casey certain intricacies of their still, which
made it better than other stills and put a greater kick in the White
Mule it bred. Somewhere back in the dim recesses of Casey's mind, he
felt that he ought to listen and remember what they told him. Vaguely
he knew that he must not take another drink, no matter how insistent
they were. In the brief glow of that resolution Casey protested that
he could hoot without any more hootch. But he hated to hurt Paw's
feelings, or Hank's or Joe's. They had made the hootch with a new and
different twist, and they were honestly anxious for his judgment and
approval. He decided that perhaps he really ought to take a little
more just to please them; not much--a couple of drinks maybe.
Wherefore, he graciously consented to taste the "run" of the day
before. Thereafter Casey Ryan hooted to the satisfaction of everybody,
himself most of all.
After an indeterminate interval the four left the still, taking a
bottle with them so that it might be had without delay, should they
meet a snake or a hydrophobia skunk or some other venomous reptile. It
was Casey who made the suggestion, and he became involved in
difficulties when he attempted the word venomous. Once started Casey
was determined to pronounce the word and pronounce it correctly,
because Casey Ryan never backed up when he once started. The result was
a peculiar humming which accompanied his reeling progress down the
drift (now so narrow that Casey scraped both shoulders frequently) to
the portal.
They stopped on the flat of the dump and argued over the advisability
of taking a drink apiece before going farther, as a sort of preventive.
Joe told them solemnly that they couldn't afford to get drunk on the
darn' stuff. It had too hard a back-action kick, he explained, and
they might forget themselves if they took too much. It was important,
Joe explained at great length, that they should not forget themselves.
The boss had always impressed upon them the grim necessity of remaining
sober whatever happened.
"We never HAVE got drunk," Joe reiterated, "and we can't afford t' git
drunk now. We've got t' keep level heads, snakes or no snakes."
Casey Ryan's head was level. He wabbled up to Joe and told him so to
his face, repeating the statement many times and in many forms. He
declaimed it all the way up the path to the dugout, and when they were
standing outside. Beyond all else, Casey was anxious that Joe should
feel perfectly certain that he, Casey Ryan, knew what he was doing,
knew what he was saying, and that his head was and always had been
perr-rf'c'ly level-l-l.
"Jus' t' prove-it--I c'n kill that jack-over-there--without-no-gun!"
Casey bragged bubblingly, running his words together as if they were
being poured in muddy liquid from his mouth. "B'lieve it?
Think-I-can't?"
The three turned circumspectly and stared solemnly at a gray burro with
a crippled front leg that had limped to the dump heap within easy
throwing distance from the cabin door. Hobbling on three legs it went
nosing painfully amongst a litter of tin cans and bent paper cartons,
hunting garbage. As if conscious that it was being talked about, the
burro lifted its head and eyed the four mournfully, its ears loosely
flopping.
"How?" questioned Paw, waggling his beard disparagingly. "Spit 'n 'is
eye?"
"Talk 'm t' death," Hank guessed with imbecile shrewdness.
"Think-I-can't? What'll--y'bet?"
They disputed the point with drunken insistence and mild imprecations,
Hank and Paw and Joe at various times siding impartially for and
against Casey. Casey gathered the impression that none of them
believed him. They seemed to think he didn't know what he was talking
about. They even questioned the fact that his head was level. He felt
that his honor was at stake and that his reputation as a truthful man
and a level-headed man was threatened.
While they wrangled, the fingers of Casey's right hand fumbled
unobserved in the sling on his left, twisting together the two short
lengths of fuse so that he might light both as one piece. Even in his
drunkenness Casey knew dynamite and how best to handle it. Judgment
might be dethroned, but the mechanical details of his profession were
grooved deep into habit and were observed automatically and without the
aid of conscious thought.
He braced himself against the dugout wall and raised his hand to the
cigarette he had with some trouble rolled and lighted. A spitting
splutter arose, that would have claimed the attention of the three, had
they not been unanimously engaged in trying to out-talk one another
upon the subject of Casey's ability to kill a burro seventy-five feet
away without a gun.
Casey glanced at them cunningly, drew back his right hand and pitched
something at the burro.
"Y' watch 'im!" he barked, and the three turned around to look, with no
clear conception of what it was they were expected to watch.
The burro jerked its head up, then bent to sniff at the thin curl of
powder smoke rising from amongst the cans. Paw and Hank and Joe were
lifted some inches from the ground with the explosion. They came down
in a hail of gravel, tin cans and fragments of burro. Casey, flattened
against the wall in preparation for the blast, laughed exultantly.
Paw and Hank and Joe picked themselves up and clung together for mutual
support and comfort. They craned necks forward, goggling incredulously
at what little was left of the burro and the pile of tin cans.
"'Z that a bumb?" Paw cackled nervously at last, clawing gravel out of
his uncombed beard. "'Z got me all shuck up. Whar's that 'r bottle?"
"'Z goin' t' eat a bumb--ol' fool burro!" Hank chortled weakly,
feeling tenderly certain nicks on his cheeks where gravel had landed.
"Paw, you ol' fool, you, don't hawg the hull thing--gimme a drink!"
"Casey's sure all right," came Joe's official O.K. of the performance.
"Casey said 'e c'd do it--'n' Casey done it!" He turned and slapped
Casey somewhat uncertainly on the back, which toppled him against the
wall again. "Good'n on us, Casey! Darn' good joke on us--'n' on the
burro!"
Whereupon they drank to Casey solemnly, and one and all, they
proclaimed that it was a VERY good joke on the burro. A merciful joke,
certainly; as you would agree had you seen the poor brute hungry and
hobbling painfully, hunting scraps of food amongst the litter of tin
cans.
After that, Casey wanted to sleep. He forced admissions from the three
that he, Casey Ryan, was all right and that he knew exactly what he was
doing and kept a level head. He crawled laboriously into his bunk,
shoes, hat and all; and, convinced that he had defended his honor and
preserved the Casey Ryan reputation untarnished, he blissfully skipped
the next eighteen hours.
CHAPTER SIX
Casey awoke under the vivid impression that some one was driving a
gadget into his skull with a "double-jack." The smell of bacon
scorching filled his very soul with the loathing of food. The sight of
Joe calmly filling his pipe roused Casey to the fighting mood--with no
power to fight. He was a sick man; and to remain alive was agony.
The squalid disorder and the stale aroma of a drunken orgy still
pervaded the dugout and made it a nightmare hole to Casey. Hank came
tittering to the bunk and offered him a cup of coffee, muddy from too
long boiling, and Joe grinned over his pipe at the colorful language
with which Casey refused the offering.
"Better take a brace uh hootch," Joe suggested with no more than his
normal ill nature. "I got some over at the still we made awhile back
that, ain't quite so kicky. Been agin' it in wood an' charcoal. That
tones 'er down. I'll go git yuh some after we eat. Kinda want a
brace, myself. That new hootch shore is a kickin' fool."
Paw accepted this remark, as high praise, and let three hot cakes burn
until their edges curled while he bragged of his skill as a maker of
moonshine. Paw himself was red-eyed and loose-lipped from yesterday's
debauch. Hank's whole face, especially in the region of his eyes, was
puffed unbecomingly. Casey, squinting an angry eye at Hank and the cup
of coffee, spared a thought from his own misery to acknowledge surprise
that anything on earth could make Hank more unpleasant to look upon.
Joe had a sickly pallor to prove the potency of the brew.
For such is the way of moonshine when fusel oil abounds, as it does
invariably in new whisky distilled by furtive amateurs working in
secret and with neither the facilities nor the knowledge for its
scientific manufacture. There is grim significance in the sardonic
humor of the man who first named it White Mule. The kick is certain
and terrific; frequently it is fatal as well. The worst of it is, you
never know what the effect will be until you have drunk the stuff; and
after you have drunk it, you are in no condition to resist the effect
or to refrain from courting further disaster.
That is what happened to Casey. The poison in the first half-pint,
swallowed under the eye of Joe's six-shooter, upset his judgment. The
poison in his further potations made a wholly different man of Casey
Ryan; and the after effect was so terrific that he would have swallowed
cyanide if it promised relief.
He gritted his teeth and suffered tortures until Joe returned and gave
him a drink of whisky in a chipped granite cup. Almost immediately he
felt better. The pounding agony in his head eased perceptibly and his
nerves ceased to quiver. After a while he sat up, gazed longingly at
the water bucket and crawled down from the bunk. He drank largely in
great gulps. His bloodshot eyes strayed meditatively to the coffee
pot. After an undecided moment he walked uncertainly to the stove and
poured himself a cup of coffee.
Casey lifted the cup to drink, but the smell of it under his nose
sickened him. He weaved uncertainly to the door, opened it and threw
out the coffee--cup and all. Which was nature flying a storm flag, had
any one with a clear head been there to observe the action and the look
on Casey's face.
"Gimme another shot uh that damn' hootch," he growled. Joe pushed the
bottle toward Casey, eyeing him curiously.
"That stuff they run yesterday shore is kicky," Joe ruminated
sympathetically. "Pap's proud as pups over it. He thinks it's the
real article--but I dunno. Shore laid yuh out, Casey, an' yuh never
got much, neither. Not enough t' lay yuh out the way it did. Y' look
sick."
"I AM sick!" Casey snarled, and poured himself a drink more generous
than was wise. "When Casey Ryan says he's sick, you can put it down
he's SICK! He don't want nobody tellin' 'im whether 'e's sick 'r
not.--he KNOWS 'e's sick!" He drank, and swore that it was rotten
stuff not fit for a hawg (which was absolute truth). Then he staggered
to the stove, picked up the coffee pot, carried it to the door and
flung it savagely outside because the odor offended him.
"Mart got back last night," Joe announced casually. "You was dead t'
the world. But we told 'im you was all right, an' I guess he aims t'
give yuh steady work an' a cut-in on the deal. We been cleanin' up
purty good money--but Mart says the market ain't what it was; too many
gone into the business. You're a good cook an' a good miner an' a
purty good feller all around--only the boss says you'll have t' cut out
the booze."
"'J you tell 'im you MADE me drink it?" Casey halted in the middle of
the floor, facing Joe indignantly.
"I told 'im I put it up t' yuh straight--what your business is, an'
all. You got no call t' kick--didn't I go swipe this bottle uh booze
for yuh t' sober up on, soon as the boss's back was turned? I knowed
yuh needed it; that's why. We all needed it. I'm just tellin' yuh the
boss don't approve of no celebrations like we had yest'day. I got up
early an' hauled that burro outa sight 'fore he seen it. That's how
much a friend I be, an' it wouldn't hurt yuh none to show a little
gratitude!"
"Gratitude, hell! A lot I got in life t' be grateful for!" Casey
slumped down on the nearest bench, laid his injured hand carefully on
the table and leaned his aching head on the other while he discoursed
bitterly on the subject of his wrongs.
His muddled memory fumbled back to his grievance against traffic cops,
distorting and magnifying the injustice he had received at their hands.
He had once had a home, a wife and a fortune, he declared, and what had
happened? Laws and cops had driven him out, had robbed him of his home
and his family and sent him out in the hills like a damned kiotey,
hopin' he'd starve to death. And where, he asked defiantly, was the
gratitude in that?
He told Joe ramblingly but more or less truthfully how he had been
betrayed and deserted by a man he had befriended; one Barney Oakes,
upon whom Casey would like to lay his hands for a minute.
"What I done to the burro ain't nothin' t' what I'd do t' that hound uh
hell!" he declared, pounding the table with his good fist.
Homeless, friendless; but Joe was his friend, and Paw and Hank were his
friends--and besides them there was in all the world not one friend of
Casey Ryan's. They were good friends and good fellows, even if they
did put too much hoot in their hootch. Casey Ryan liked his hootch with
a hoot in it.
He was still hooting (somewhat incoherently it is true, with recourse
now and then to the bottle because he was sick and he didn't give a
darn who knew it) when the door opened and he whom they called Mart
walked in. Joe introduced him to Casey, who sat still upon the bench
and looked him over with drunken disparagement. Casey had a hazy
recollection of wanting to see the boss and have it out with him, but
he could not recall what it was that he had been so anxious to quarrel
about.
Mart was a slender man of middle height, with thin, intelligent face
and a look across the eyes like the old woman who rocked in the stone
hut. He glanced from the bottle to Casey, eyeing him sharply. Drunk
or sober, Casey was not the man to be stared down; nevertheless his
fingers strayed involuntarily to his shirt collar and pulled fussily at
the wrinkles.
"So you're the man they've been holding here for my inspection," Mart
said coolly, with a faint smile at Casey's evident discomfort. "You're
still hitting it up, I see. Joe, take that bottle away from him. When
he's sober enough to talk straight, I'll give him the third degree and
see what he really is, anyway. Guess he's all right--but he sure can
lap up the booze. That's a point against him."
Casey's hand went to the bottle, beating Joe's by three inches. He did
not particularly want the whisky, but it angered him to hear Mart order
it taken from him. Away back in his mind where reason had gone into
hiding, Casey knew that some great injustice was being done him; that
he, Casey Ryan, was not the man they were calmly taking it for granted
that he was.
With the bottle in his hand he rose and walked unsteadily to his bunk.
He did not like this man they called the boss. He remembered that in
his bunk, under the bedding, he had concealed something that would make
him the equal of them all. He fumbled under the blankets, found what
he sought and with his back turned to the others he slipped the thing
into his sling out of sight.
Mart and Joe were talking together by the table, paying no attention to
Casey, who was groggily making up his mind to crawl into his bunk and
take another sleep. He still meant to have it out with Mart, but he
did not feel like tackling the job just now.
Mart turned to the door and Joe got up to follow him, with a careless
glance over his shoulder at Casey, who was lifting a foot as if it
weighed a great deal, and was groping with it in the air trying to
locate the edge of the lower bunk. Joe laughed, but the laugh died in
his throat, choked off suddenly by what he saw when Mart pulled open
the door.
Casey turned suspiciously at the laugh and the sound of the door
opening. He swung round and steadied himself with his back against the
bunk when he saw Mart and Joe lift their hands and hold them there,
palms outward, a bit higher than their heads. Something in the sight
enraged Casey unreasoningly. A flick of the memory may have carried
him back to the old days in the mining camps when Casey drove stage and
hold-ups were frequent.
"What 'r yuh tryin' to pull on me now?" he bawled, and rushed headlong
toward them, pushing them forcibly out into the open with a collision
of his body against Joe. Outside, a voice harshly commanded him to
throw up his hands--and it was then that Casey Ryan's Irish fighting
blood boiled and bubbled over. Unconsciously he pushed his hat forward
over one eye, drew back his lips in a fighting grin, stepped down off
the low doorsill with a lurch that nearly sent him sprawling and went
weaving belligerently toward a group of five men whose attitude was
anything but conciliatory.
"Casey Ryan! I'm dogged if it ain't Casey!" exclaimed a familiar voice
in the group, whereat the others looked astonished. Through his slits
of swollen lids Casey glared toward the voice and recognized Barney
Oakes, grinning at him with what Casey considered a Judas treachery.
He saw two men step away from Joe and the boss, leaving them in
handcuffs.
"Take them irons off'n my friends!" bellowed Casey as he charged.
"Whadda yuh think you're doin', anyway? Take 'em off! It's Casey Ryan
that's tellin' yuh, an' yuh better heed what he says, before you're
tore from limb to limb!"
"B-but, Casey! This 'ere's a shurf's possy!" The voice of Barney rose
in a protesting 'squawk. "I brung 'em all the way over here to your
rescue! They brung a cor'ner to view your remains! Don't you know
your pardner, BARNEY OAKES?
"Ah-h--I know yuh think I don't? I know yuh to a fare-yuh-well! Brung
a cor'ner, did yuh? Tha's all right--goin' t' need a cor'ner-but he
won't set on Casey Ryan's remains--you c'n ask anybody if any cor'ners
ever set on Casey Ryan yit! Naw." Casey snarled as contemptuously as
was possible to a man in his condition. "No cor'ner ever set on Casey
Ryan, an' he ain't goin' to!"
The men glanced questioningly at one another. One laughed. He was a
large, smooth-jowled man inclined to portliness, and his laugh vibrated
his entire front contagiously so that the others grinned and took it
for granted that Casey Ryan was a comedy element introduced
unexpectedly where they had thought to find him a tragedy.
"No, you're a pretty lively man for me to sit on; I admit it," the
portly man remarked. "I'm the coroner, and it looks as if I wouldn't
sit, this trip."
Casey eyed him blearily, not in the least mollified but instead
swinging to a certain degree of lucidity that was nevertheless governed
largely by the hoot he had swallowed in the hootch.
"There's part of a burro 'round here some'er's you c'n set on," Casey
informed him grimly, and fumbled in his coat pocket for his pipe. He
drew it out empty, looked at it and returned it to his pocket. One who
knew Casey intimately would have detected a hidden purpose in his
manner. The warning was faint, indefinable at best, and difficult to
picture in words. One might say that an intimate acquaintance would
have detected a false note in Casey's defiance. His manner was
restrained just when violence would have been more natural.
"Damn a pipe," Casey grumbled with drunken petulance. "Anybody got a
cigarette? I'm single-handed an' I ain't able t' roll 'em."
It was the coroner himself who handed Casey a "tailor-made." Casey
nodded glumly, accepted a match and lighted the cigarette almost as if
he were sober. He looked the group over noncommittally, eyed again the
handcuffs on Mart and Joe, sent a veiled glance toward Barney Oakes and
turned away. He still held the center of the stage. Fully expecting
to find him dead, the sheriff and his men were slow to adjust
themselves to the fact that he was very much alive and very drunk and
apparently not greatly interested in his rescue.
Casey halted in his unsteady progress toward the dugout. The sheriff
was already questioning his two prisoners about other members of the
gang; but he looked up when Casey lifted up his voice and spoke his
mind of the moment.
"Brung a cor'ner, did yuh, lookin' for some one to set on! Barney Oakes
is the man that'll need a cor'ner in a minute. You're all goin' to need
'im. Casey Ryan never stood around yit whilst his friends was hobbled
up by a shurf--turn 'em loose an' turn 'em loose quick! An' git back
away from Barney Oakes so he won't drop on yuh in chunks--I'll fix 'im
for yuh to set on!"
His hand had gone up to his cigarette, but only Joe knew what was
likely to follow. Joe gave a yell of warning, ducked and ran straight
away from the group. The sheriff yelled also and gave chase. The
group was broken--luckily--just as Casey heaved something in that
direction.
"I blowed up a jackass yesterday when they thought I couldn't--I'll
blow up a bunch of 'em to-day! Yuh c'n set on what's left uh Barney
Oakes!"
The explosion scattered dirt and small stones--and the sheriff's posse.
Casey sent one malevolent glance over his shoulder as he stumbled into
the dugout.
"Missed 'im!" he grumbled disgustedly to himself when he saw no
fragments of Barney falling. His ferociousness, like the dynamite,
annihilated itself with the explosion. "Missed 'im! Casey Ryan's
gittin' old; old an' sick an' a damn' fool. Missed 'im with the last
shot--drunk--drunk an' don't give a darn!"
He slammed the door shut behind him, pushed his hat forward so
violently that it rested on the bridge of his nose, and wabbled over to
his bunk. This time his foot found the edge of the lower bunk, and he
scratched and clawed his way up and rolled in upon the blankets.
He was asleep and snoring when the sheriff, edging his way in as if he
were an animal trainer's apprentice entering the lion's cage, sneaked
on his toes to the bunk and slipped the handcuffs on Casey.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Casey awoke almost sober and considerably surprised when he discovered
the handcuffs. His injured hand was throbbing from the poison in his
system and the steel band on his swollen wrist. His head still ached
frightfully and his tongue felt thick and dry as flannel in his mouth.
He rolled over and sat up, staring uncomprehendingly at the cabin full
of men. The sight of Barney Oakes recalled in a measure his
performance with the dynamite; at least, he felt a keen disappointment
that Barney was alive and whole and grinning. Casey could not see what
there was to grin about, and he took it as a direct insult to himself.
Mart and Joe sat sullenly on a bench against the wall, and Paw reclined
in his bunk at the farther end of the room. A blood-stained bandage
wrapped Paw's head turbanwise, and his little, deep-set eyes gleamed
wickedly in his pallid face. Casey looked for Hank, but he was not
there.
A strange man was cooking supper, and Casey wanted to tell him that he
was slicing the bacon twice as thick as it should be. The corpulent
man, whom he dimly remembered as a coroner, was talking with a big,
burly individual whom Casey guessed was the sheriff. A man came in and
announced to the big man that the car was fixed and they could go any
time. Mart, who had been staring morosely down at his shackled wrists,
lifted his head and spoke to the sheriff.
"You'll have to do something about my mother," he said, and bit his lip
at the manner in which every head swung his way.
"What about your mother?" the sheriff asked moving toward him. "Is she
here?" His eyes sent a quick glance around the room which obviously
had four outside walls.
Mart swallowed. "She has a cabin to herself," he explained
constrainedly. "She--she isn't quite right. Strangers excite her.
She--hasn't been well since my father was killed in the mine; she's
quiet enough with us--she knows us. I don't know how she'll be now.
I'm afraid--but she can't be left here alone; all I ask is, be as
gentle as you can."
The sheriff looked from him to Joe. Joe nodded confirmation. "Plumb
harmless," he said gruffly. "It IS kinda--pitiful. Thinks everybody in
the world is damned and going to hell on a long lope." He gave a snort
that resembled neither mirth nor disgust. "Mebbe she's right at that,"
he added grimly.
The sheriff asked more questions, and Mart stood up. "I'll show you
where she is, sure. But can't you leave her be till we're ready to
start? She--it ain't right to bring her here."
"She'll want her supper," the sheriff reminded Mart. "We'll be driving
all night. Is she sick abed?"
Casey lay down again and turned his face to the wall. He remembered
the old woman now, and he hoped sincerely they would not bring her into
the cabin. But whatever they did, Casey wanted no part in it whatever.
He wanted to be left alone, and he wanted to think. More than all else
he wanted not to see again the old woman who chanted horrible things
while she rocked and rocked.
He was roused from uneasy slumber by two officious souls, one of whom
was Barney Oakes. Their intentions were kindly enough, they only
wanted to give him his supper. But Casey wanted neither supper nor
kindly intentions, and he was still unregenerately regretful that
Barney Oakes was not lying out on the garbage heap in a more or less
fragmentary condition. They raised him to a sitting posture, and Casey
swung his legs over the edge of the bunk and delivered a ferocious kick
at Barney Oakes.
He caught Barney under the chin, and Barney went down for several
counts. After that Casey wore hobbles on his feet, and was secretly
rather proud of the fact that they considered him so dangerous as all
that. Had his mood not been a sulky one which refused to have speech
with any one there, they would probably have found it wise to gag him
as well.
That is one night in Casey's turbulent life which he never recalled if
he could help it. Two cars had brought the sheriff's party, and one
was a seven-passenger. In the roomy rear seat of this car, Casey,
shackled and savage, was made to ride with Mart and his mother. Two
deputies occupied the folding seats and never relaxed their
watchfulness.
Casey's head still ached splittingly, and the jolting of the car did
not serve to ease the pain. The old woman sat in the middle, with a
blanket wound round and round her to hold her quiet; which it failed to
do. Into Casey's ear rolled the full volume of her rich contralto
voice as she monotonously intoned the doom of all mankind--together
with every cat, every rat, etc. Mart's fear had proved well-founded.
Strangers had excited the woman and it was not until sheer exhaustion
silenced her that she ceased for one moment her horrible chant.
I read the story in the morning paper, and made a flying trip to San
Bernardino. Casey was in jail, naturally; but he didn't care much
about that so long as he owned a head with an air-drill going inside.
At least, that is what he told me when I was let in to see him. I was
working to get him out of there on bail if possible before I sent word
to the Little Woman, hoping she had not read the papers. I had some
trouble piecing the facts together and trying to get the straight of
things before I sent word to the Little Woman. I went out and got him
some medicine guaranteed, by the doctor who wrote the prescription, to
take the hoot out of the hootch Casey had swallowed. That afternoon
Casey left off glaring at me, sat up, accepted a cigarette and
consented to talk.
"--an' all I got to say is, Barney Oakes is a liar an' the father uh
liars. I never was in cahoots with him at no time. When he says I got
'im to foller a Joshuay palm jest to git 'im out in the hills an' kill
'im off, he lies. Let 'im come an' tell me that there story!"
Casey was still slightly abnormal, I noticed, so I calmed him as best I
could and left him alone for a time. There was some hesitancy about
the bail, too, which I wished to overcome. Throwing that half-stick of
dynamite might be construed as an attempt at wholesale murder. I did
not want the county officials to think too long and harshly about the
matter.
I explained later to Casey that Barney Oakes had reported his
disappearance to the officials in Barstow. The sheriff's office had
long suspected a nest of moonshiners somewhere near Black Butte, and it
was rumored that one Mart Hanson, who owned a mine up there, was
banking more money than was reasonable, these hard times, for a miner,
who ships no ore. Casey's disappearance had crystallized the
suspicions into an immediate investigation. And Barney's assertion
that Casey had been murdered took the coroner along with the posse.
It had all been straight and fairly simple until they reached the mine
and discovered Casey uproariously one of the gang. Throwing loaded
dynamite at sheriffs is frowned upon nowadays in the best official
circles, I told Casey; he would have to explain that in court, I was
afraid.
Then Barney, after Casey had kicked him in the chin, had reversed his
first report of the trouble and was now declaiming to all who would
listen that he had been decoyed to Black Butte by Casey Ryan and there
ambushed and nearly killed. Casey, as Barney now interpreted the
incident, had joined his confederates under the very thin pretense of
climbing the butte to come at them from behind. Barney now remembered
that he had been shot at from three different angles, and that the
burros had been killed by pistol shots fired at close range--presumably
by Casey Ryan.
It was like taming tigers to make Casey sit still and listen to all
this, but I had to do it so that he would know what to disprove.
Afterwards I had a talk with Joe and Paw, separately, and so got at the
whole truth. They bore no malice toward Casey and were perfectly
willing to see him out of the scrape. They were a sobered pair; Hank,
like a fool, had fired at the posse and was killed.
The next day came the Little Woman to the rescue. I told her the whole
story, not even omitting the burro, before she went to the jail to see
Casey. It was a pretty mess--take it all around--and I was secretly
somewhat doubtful of the outcome.
The Little Woman is game as women are made. She went with me to the
jail, and she met Casey with a whimsical smile. We found him sitting
on the side of his bunk with his legs stretched out and his feet
crossed, his good hand thrust in his trousers pocket and a cigarette in
one corner of his mouth, which turned sourly downward. He cocked an eye
up at us and rose, as the Little Woman had maybe taught him was proper.
But he did not say a word until the Little Woman walked up and kissed
him on both cheeks, turning his face this way and that with her hand
under his chin.
Casey grinned sheepishly then and hugged her with his good arm. I wish
you could have seen the look in his eyes when they dwelt on the Little
Woman!
"Casey Ryan, you need a shave. And your shirt collar is a disgrace to
a Piute," she drawled reprovingly.
Casey looked at me over her shoulder and grinned. He hadn't a word to
say for himself, which was unusual in Casey Ryan.
"It's lucky for you, Casey Ryan, that I remembered to go down to the
police station and get the proof that you were pinched twice on
Broadway just five days before Barney Oakes says he found you stalled
in the trail north of Barstow; and that you had been pinched pretty
regularly every whip-stitch for the last six months, and were a
familiar and unwelcome figure in downtown traffic and elsewhere.
"The sheriff who raided Black Butte admitted to me that it is utterly
impossible for the world to hold more than one Casey Ryan at a time;
and that he, for one, is willing to accept the word of the city police
that you were there raising the record for traffic trouble and not
moonshining at Black Butte. He doesn't approve of throwing dynamite at
people, but--well, I talked with the prosecuting attorney, too, and
they both seem to be mighty nice men and reasonable. I'm afraid Barney
Oakes will see his beautiful story all spoiled."
"He'll forget it when he feels the ruin to his face I'm goin' t' create
for him if I ever meet up with 'im again," Casey commented grimly.
"Babe sent you a pincushion she made in school. I think she made
beautiful, neat stitches in that C," went on the Little Woman in a
placid, gossipy tone invented especially for domestic conversation.
"And--oh, yes! There's a new laundryman on our route, and he PERSISTS
in running across the lawn and dumping the laundry in the front hall,
though I've told him and TOLD him to deliver it at the back. And
there's a new tenant in Number Six, and they hadn't been in more than
three days before he came home drunk and kept everybody in the house
awake, bellowing up and down the hall and abusing his wife and all. I
told him held have to go when his month is up, but he says he'll be
damned if he will. He says he won't and I can't make him."
"He won't, hey?" A familiar, pale glitter came into Casey's eyes. "You
watch and see whether he goes or not! He better tell Casey Ryan he
won't go! Who'd, they think's runnin' the place? Lemme ketch that
laundry driver oncet, runnin' across our lawn; I'll run 'im across
it--on his nose! They take advantage of you quick as my back's turned.
I'll learn 'em they got Casey Ryan to reckon with!"
The Little Woman gave me a smiling glance over Casey's shoulder, and
lowered a cautious eyelid. I left them then and went away to have a
satisfying talk with the sheriff and the prosecuting attorney.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In the desert, where roads are fewer and worse than they should be, a
man may travel wherever he can negotiate the rocks and sand, and none
may say him nay. If any man objects, the traveler is by custom
privileged to whip the objector if he is big enough, and afterwards go
on his way with the full approval of public opinion. He may blaze a
trail of his own, return that way a year later and find his trail an
established thoroughfare.
In the desert Casey gave trail to none nor asked reprisals if he
suffered most in a sudden meeting. In Los Angeles Casey was halted and
rebuked on every corner, so he complained; hampered and annoyed by
rules and regulations which desert dwellers never dreamed of.
Since he kept the optimistic viewpoint of a child, experience seemed to
teach him little. Like the boy he was at heart, he was perfectly
willing to make good resolutions--all of which were more or less
theoretical and left to a kindly Providence to keep intact for him.
So here he was, after we had pried him loose from his last predicament,
perfectly optimistic under his fresh haircut, and thinking the traffic
cops would not remember him. Thinking, too--as he confided to the
Little Woman--that Los Angeles looked pretty good, after all. He was
resolved to lead henceforth a blameless life. It was time he settled
down, Casey declared virtuously. His last trip into the desert was all
wrong, and he wanted you to ask anybody if Casey Ryan wasn't ready at
any and all times to admit his mistakes, if he ever happened to make
any. He was starting in fresh now, with a new deal all around from a
new deck. He had got up and walked around his chair, he told us, and
had thrown the ash of a left-handed cigarette over his right shoulder;
he'd show the world that Casey Ryan could and would keep out of gunshot
of trouble.
He was rehearsing all this and feeling very self-righteous while he
drove down West Washington Street. True, he was doing twenty-five
where he shouldn't, but so far no officer had yelled at him and he
hadn't so much as barked a fender. Down across Grand Avenue he
larruped, never noticing the terrific bounce when he crossed the water
drains there (being still fresh from desert roads). He was still doing
twenty-five when he turned into Hill Street.
Busy with his good resolutions and the blameless life he was about to
lead, Casey forgot to signal the left-hand turn. In the desert you
don't signal, because the nearest car is probably forty or fifty miles
behind you and collisions are not imminent.
West-Washington-and-Hill-Street crossing is not desert, however. A car
was coming behind Casey much closer than fifty miles; one of those
scuttling Ford delivery trucks. It locked fenders with Casey when he
swung to the left. The two cars skidded as one toward the right-hand
curb; caught amidships a bright yellow, torpedo-tailed runabout coming
up from Main Street, and turned it neatly on its back, its four wheels
spinning helplessly in the quiet, sunny morning. Casey himself was
catapulted over the runabout, landing abruptly in a sitting position on
the corner of the vacant lot beyond, his self-righteousness
considerably jarred.
A new traffic officer had been detailed to watch that intersection and
teach a driving world that it must not cut corners. A bright, new
traffic button had been placed in the geographical center of the
crossing; and woe be unto the right-hand pocket of any man who failed
to drive circumspectly around it. New traffic officers are apt to be
keenly conscientious in their work. At twenty-five dollars per cut,
sixteen unhappy drivers had been taught where the new button was
located and had been informed that twelve miles per hour at that
crossing would be tolerated, and that more would be expensive.
Not all drivers take their teaching meekly, and the new traffic officer
near the end of his shift had pessimistically decided that the driving
world is composed mostly of blamed idiots and hardened criminals.
He gritted his teeth ominously when Casey Ryan came down upon the
crossing at double the legal speed. He held his breath for an instant
during the crash that resounded for blocks. When the dust had settled,
he ran over and yanked off the dented sand of the vacant lot a dazed
and hardened malefactor who had committed three traffic crimes in three
seconds: he had exceeded the speed limit outrageously, cut fifteen feet
inside the red button, and failed to signal the turn.
"You damned, drunken boob!" shouted the new traffic cop and shook Casey
Ryan (not knowing him).
Shaking Casey will never be safe until he is in his coffin with a lily
in his hand. He was considerably jolted, but he managed a fourth crime
in the next five minutes. He licked the traffic cop rather
thoroughly--I suppose because his onslaught was wholly
unexpected--kicked an expostulating minister in the pit of the stomach,
and was profanely volunteering to lick the whole darned town when he
was finally overwhelmed by numbers and captured alive; which speaks
well for the L. A. P.
Wherefore Casey Ryan continued his ride down town in a dark car that
wears a clamoring bell the size of a breakfast plate under the driver's
foot, and a dark red L. A. Police Patrol sign painted on the sides.
Two uniformed, stern-lipped cops rode with him and didn't seem to care
if Casey's nose WAS bleeding all over his vest. A uniformed cop stood
on the steps behind, and another rode beside the driver and kept his
eye peeled over his shoulder, thinking he would be justified in
shooting if anything started inside. Boys on bicycles pedaled
furiously to keep up, and many an automobile barely escaped the curb
because the driver was goggling at the mussed-up prisoner in the "Black
Maria."
The Little Woman telegraphed me at San Francisco that night. The wire
was brief but disquieting. It merely said, "CASEY IN JAIL SERIOUS NEED
HELP." But I caught the Lark an hour later and thanked God it was
running on time.
The Little Woman and I spent two frantic days getting Casey out of
jail. The traffic cop's defeat had been rather public; and just as
soon as he could stand up straight in the pulpit, the minister meant to
preach a series of sermons against the laxity of a police force that
permits such outrages to occur in broad daylight. More than that, the
thing was in the papers, and people were reading and giggling on the
street cars and in restaurants. Wherefore, the L. A. P. was on its tin
ear.
Even so, much may be accomplished for a man so wholesomely human as
Casey Ryan. On the third day the charge against him was changed from
something worse to "Reckless driving and disturbing the peace." Casey
was persuaded to plead guilty to that charge, which was harder to
accomplish than mollifying the L. A. P.
He paid two fifty-dollar fines and was forbidden to drive a car "in the
County of Los Angeles, State of California, during the next succeeding
period of two years." He was further advised (unofficially but
nevertheless with complete sincerity) to pay all damages to the two
cars he had wrecked and to ask the minister's doctor what was his fee;
a new uniform for the traffic cop was also suggested, since Casey had
thrust his foot violently into the cop's pocket which was not tailored
to resist the strain. The judge also observed, in the course of the
conversation, that desert air was peculiarly invigorating and that
Casey should not jeopardize his health and well-being by filling his
lungs with city smoke.
I couldn't blame Casey much for the mood he was in after a setback like
that to his good resolutions. I was inclined to believe with Casey
that Providence had lain down on the job.
CHAPTER NINE
At the corner of the Plaza where traffic is heaviest, a dingy Ford
loaded with camp outfit stalled on the street-car track just as the
traffic officer spread-eagled his arms and turned with majestic
deliberation to let the East-and-West traffic through. The motorman
slid open his window and shouted insults at the driver, and the traffic
cop left his little platform and strode heavily toward the Ford,
pulling his book out of his pocket with the mechanical motion born of
the grief of many drivers.
Casey Ryan, clinging to the front step of the street car on his way to
the apartment house he once more called home, swung off and beat the
traffic officer to the Ford. He stooped and gave a heave on the crank,
obeyed a motion of the driver's head when the car started, and stepped
upon the running board. The traffic officer paused, waved his book
warningly and said something. The motorman drew in his head, clanged
the bell, and the afternoon traffic proceeded to untangle.
"Get in, old-timer," invited the driver whom Casey had assisted. Casey
did not ask whether the driver was going in his direction, but got in
chuckling at the small triumph over his enemies, the police.
"Fords are mean cusses," he observed sympathetically. "They like
nothing better than to get a feller in bad. But they can't pull
nothin' on me. I know 'em to a fare-you-well. Notice how this one
changed 'er mind about gettin' you tagged, soon as Casey Ryan took 'er
by the nose?"
"Are you Casey Ryan?" The driver took his eyes off the traffic long
enough to give Casey an appraising look that measured him mentally and
physically. "Say, I've heard quite a lot about you. Bill Masters, up
at Lund, has spoke of you often. He knows you, don't he?"
"Bill Masters sure had ought t' know me," Casey grinned. In a big,
roaring, unfriendly city, here sounded a friendly, familiar tone; a
voice straight from the desert, as it were. Casey forgot what had
happened when Barney Oakes crossed his path claiming acquaintance with
Bill Masters, of Lund. He bit off a chew of tobacco, hunched down
lower in the seat, and prepared himself for a real conflab with the man
who spoke the language of his tribe.
He forgot that he had just bought tickets to that evening's performance
at the Orpheum, as a sort of farewell offering to his domestic goddess
before once more going into voluntary exile as advised by the judge.
Pasadena Avenue heard conversational fragments such as, "Say! Do you
know--? Was you in Lund when--?"
Casey's new friend drove as fast as the law permitted. He talked of
many places and men familiar to Casey, who was in a mood that hungered
for those places and men in a spiritual revulsion against the city and
all its ways.
Pasadena, Lamanda Park, Monrovia--it was not until the car slowed for
the Glendora speed-limit sign that Casey lifted himself off his
shoulder blades, and awoke to the fact that he was some distance from
home and that the shadows were growing rather long.
"Say! I better get out here and 'phone to the missus," he exclaimed
suddenly. "Pull up at a drug store or some place, will yuh? I got to
talkin' an' forgot I was on my way home when I throwed in with yuh."
"Aw, you can 'phone any time. There is street cars running back to
town all the time I or you can catch a bus anywhere's along here. I got
pinched once for drivin' through here without a tail-light; and twice
I've had blowouts right along here. This town's a jinx for me and I
want to slip it behind me."
Casey nodded appreciatively. "Every darn' town's a jinx for me," he
confided resentfully. "Towns an' Casey Ryan don't agree. Towns is
harder on me than sour beans."
"Yeah--I guess L. A.'s a jinx for you all right. I heard about your
latest run-in with the cops. I wish t' heck you'd of cleaned up a few
for me. I love them saps the way I like rat poison. I've got no use
for the clowns nor for towns that actually hands 'em good jack for
dealin' misery to us guys. The bird never lived that got a square deal
from 'em. They grab yuh and dust yuh off--"
"They won't grab Casey Ryan no more. Why, lemme tell yuh what they
done!"
Glendora slipped behind and was forgotten while Casey told the story of
his wrongs. In no particular, according to his version, had he been
other than law-abiding. Nobody, he declaimed heatedly, had ever taken
HIM by the scruff of the neck and shaken him like a pup, and got away
with it, and nobody ever would. Casey was Irish and his father had been
Irish, and the Ryan never lived that took sass and said thank-yuh.
His new friend listened with just that degree of sympathy which
encourages the unburdening of the soul. When Casey next awoke to the
fact that he was getting farther and farther away from home, they were
away past Claremont and still going to the full extent of the speed
limit. His friend had switched on the lights.
"I GOT to telephone my wife!" Casey exclaimed uneasily. "I'll gamble
she's down to the police station right now, lookin' for me. An' I want
the cops t' kinda forgit about me. I got to talkin' along an' plumb
forgot I wasn't headed home."
"Aw, you can 'phone from Fontana. I'll have to stop there anyway for
gas. Say, why don't yuh stall 'er off till morning? You couldn't get
home for supper now if yuh went by wireless. I guess yuh wouldn't hate
a mouthful of desert air after swallowing smoke and insults, like yuh
done in L. A. Tell her you're takin' a ride to Barstow. You can catch
a train out of there and be home to breakfast, easy. If you ain't got
the change in your clothes for carfare," he added generously, "Why,
I'll stake yuh just for your company on the trip. Whadda yuh say?"
Casey looked at the orange and the grapefruit and lemon orchards that
walled the Foothill Boulevard. All trees looked alike to Casey, and
these reminded him disagreeably of the fruit stalls in Los Angeles.
"Well, mebby I might go on to Barstow. Too late now to take the missus
to the show, anyway. I guess I can dig up the price uh carfare from
Barstow back." He chuckled with a sinful pride in his prosperity,
which was still new enough to be novel. "Yuh don't catch Casey Ryan
goin' around no more without a dime in his hind pocket. I've felt the
lack of 'em too many times when they was needed. Casey Ryan's going to
carry a jingle louder'n a lead burro from now on. You can ask anybody."
"You bet it's wise for a feller to go heeled," the friend of Bill
Masters responded easily. "You never know when yuh might need it.
Well, there's a Bell sign over there. You can be askin' your wife's
consent while I gas up."
Innocent pleasure; the blameless joy of riding in a Ford toward the
desert, with a prince of a fellow for company, was not so easily made
to sound logical and a perfectly commonplace incident over a
long-distance telephone. The Little Woman seemed struck with a sense
of the unusual; her voice betrayed trepidation and she asked questions
which Casey found it difficult to answer. That he was merely riding as
far as Barstow with a desert acquaintance and would catch the first
train back, she apparently failed to find convincing.
"Casey Ryan, tell me the truth. If you're in a scrape again, you know
perfectly well that Jack and I will have to come and get you out of it.
San Bernardino sounds bad to me, Casey, and you're pretty close to the
place. Do you really want me to believe that you're coming back on the
next train?"
"Sure as I'm standin' here! What makes yuh think I'm in a scrape?
Didn't I tell yuh I'm goin' to walk around trouble from now on? When
Casey tells you a thing like that, yuh got a right to put it down for
the truth. I'm going to Barstow for a breath uh fresh air. This is a
feller that knows Bill Masters. I'll be home to breakfast. I ain't in
no trouble an' I ain't goin' to be. You can believe that or you can set
there callin' Casey Ryan a liar till I git back. G'by."
Whatever the Little Woman thought of it, Casey really meant to do
exactly what he said he would do. And he really did not believe that
trouble was within a hundred miles of him.
CHAPTER TEN
"Wanta drive?" Casey's friend was rolling a smoke before he cranked
up. "They tell me up in Lund that no man livin' ever got the chance to
look back and see Casey Ryan swallowing dust. I've heard of some
that's tried. But I reckon," he added pensively, while he rubbed the
damp edge of the paper down carefully with a yellowed thumb, "Fords is
out of your line, now. Maybe you don't toy with nothin' cheaper than a
twin-six."
"Well, you can ask anybody if Casey Ryan's the man to git big-headed!
Money don't spoil ME none. There ain't anybody c'n say it does. Casey
Ryan is Casey Ryan wherever an' whenever yuh meet up with him. Yuh
might mebby see me next, hazin' a burro over a ridge. Or yuh might see
me with ten pounds uh flour, a quart uh beans an' a sour-dough bucket
on my back. Whichever way the game breaks--you'll be seein' Casey
Ryan; an' you'll see 'im settin' in the game an' ready t' push his last
white chip to the center."
"I believe it, Casey. Darned if I don't. Well, you drive 'er awhile;
till yuh get tired, anyway." He bent to the crank, gave a heave and
climbed in, with Casey behind the wheel, looking pleased to be there
and quite ready to show the world he could drive.
"Say, if I drive till I'm TIRED," he retorted, "I'm liable to soak 'er
hubs in the Atlantic Ocean before I quit. And then, mebby I'll back
'er out an' drive 'er to the end of Venice Pier just for pastime."
"Up in Lund they're talkin' yet about your drivin'," his new friend
flattered him. "They say there's no stops when you get the wheel
cuddled up to your chest. No quittin' an' no passin' yuh by with a
merry laugh an' a cloud of alkali dust. I guess it's right. I've been
wantin' to meet yuh."
"That there last remark sounds like a traffic cop I had a run-in with
once!" Casey snorted--merely to hide his gratification. "You sound
good, just to listen to, but you ain't altogether believable. There's
men in Lund that'd give an ear to meet me in a narrow trail with a
hairpin turn an' me on the outside an' drunk.
"They'd like it to be about a four-thousand-foot drop, straight down.
Lund as a town ain't so crazy about me that they'd close up whilst I
was bein' planted, an' stop all traffic for five minutes. A show
benefit was sprung on Lund once, to help Casey Ryan that was supposed
to be crippled. An' I had to give a good Ford--a DARN' good Ford!--to
the benefitters, so is they could git outa town ahead uh the howlin'
mob. That's how I know the way Lund loves Casey Ryan. Yuh can't kid
ME, young feller."
Meanwhile, Casey swung north into Cajon Pass; up that long, straight,
cement-paved highway to the hills he showed his new friend how a Ford
could travel when Casey Ryan juggled the wheel. The full moon was
pushing up into a cloud bank over a high peak beyond the Pass. The few
cars they met were gone with a whistle of wind as Casey shot by.
He raced a passenger train from the mile whistling-post to the
crossing, made the turn and crossed the track with the white finger of
the headlight bathing the Ford blindingly. He completed that S turn
and beat the train to the next crossing half a mile farther on; where
he "spiked 'er tail", as he called it, stopping dead still and waiting
jeeringly for the train to pass. The engineer leaned far out of the
cab window to bellow his opinion of such driving; which was unfavorable
to the full extent of his vocabulary.
"Nothin' the matter with a Ford, as I can see," Casey observed
carelessly, when he was under way again.
"You sure are some driver," his new friend praised him, letting go the
edge of the car and easing down again into the seat. "Give yuh a Ford
and all the gas yuh can burn and I can't see that you'd need to worry
none about any of them saps that makes it their business to interfere
with travelin'. I'm glad that moon's quit the job. Gives the
headlights a show. Hit 'er up now, fast as yuh like. After that
crossin' back there I ain't expectin' to tremble on no curves. I see
you're qualified to spin 'er on a plate if need be. And for a Ford,
she sure can travel."
Casey therefore "let 'er out", and the Ford went like a scared lizard
up the winding highway through the Pass. At Cajon Camp he slowed,
thinking they would need to fill the radiator before attempting to
climb the steep grade to the summit. But the young man shook his head
and gave the "highball." (Which, if you don't already know it, is the
signal for full speed ahead.)
Full speed ahead Casey gave him, and they roared on up the steep,
twisting grade to the summit of the Pass. Casey began to feel a
distinct admiration for this particular Ford. The car was heavily
loaded--he could gauge the weight by the "feel" of the car as he drove
yet it made the grade at twenty-five miles an hour and reached the top
without boiling the radiator; which is better than many a more
pretentious car could do.
"Too bad you've made your pile already," the young man broke a long
silence. "I'd like to have a guy like you for my pardner. The desert
ain't talkative none when you're out in the middle of it, and you know
there ain't another human in a day's drive. I've been going it alone.
Nine-tenths of these birds that are eager to throw in with yuh thinks
that fifty-fifty means you do the work and they take the jack. I'm
plumb fed upon them pardnerships. But if you didn't have your jack
stored away--a hull mountain of it, I reckon--I'd invite yuh to set
into the game with me; I sure would."
Casey spat into the dark beside the car. "They's never a pile so big a
feller ain't willin' to make it bigger," he replied sententiously.
"Fer, as I'm concerned, Casey's never backed up from a dollar yet. But
I ain't no wild colt no more, runnin' loose an' never a halter mark on
me. I'm bein' broke to harness, and it's stable an' corral from now
on, an' no more open range fer Casey. The missus hopes to high-school
me in time. She's a good hand--gentle but firm, as the preacher says.
And I guess it's time fer Casey Ryan to quit hellin' around the country
an' settle down an' behave himself."
"I could put you in the way of adding some easy money to your bank
roll," the other suggested tentatively.
But Casey shook his head. "Twenty years ago yuh needn't have asked me
twice, young feller. I'd 'a' drawed my chair right up and stacked my
chips a mile high. Any game that come along, I played 'er down to the
last chip. Twenty years ago--yes, er ten!--Casey Ryan woulda tore that
L. A. jail down rock by rock an' give the roof t' the kids to make a
playhouse. Them L. A. cops never woulda hauled me t' jail in no wagon.
I mighta loaded 'em in behind, and dropped 'em off at the first morgue
an' drove on a-whistlin'. That there woulda been Casey Ryan's gait a
few years back. Take me now, married to a good woman an' gettin'
gray--" Casey sighed, gazing wishfully back at the Casey Ryan he had
been and might never be again.
"No, sir, I ain't so darned rich I ain't willin' to add a few more iron
men to the bunch. But on account of the missus I've got to kinda pick
my chances. I ain't had money so long but what it feels good to remind
myself I got it. I carry a thousand dollars or so in my inside pocket,
just to count over now an' then to convince myself I needn't worry
about a grubstake. I've got to soak it into my bones gradual that I
can afford to settle down and live tame, like the missus wants.
Stand-up collars every day, an' step into a chiny bathtub every night
an' scrub--when you ain't doin' nothin' to git dirt under your finger
nails even! Funny, the way city folks act. The less they do to git
dirty, the more soap they wear out. You can ask anybody if that ain't
right.
"Can't chew tobacco in the house, even, 'cause there's no place yuh
dast to spit. I stuck m' head out of the bedroom window oncet, an I
let fly an' it landed on a lady; an' the missus went an' bought her a
new hat an took my plug away from me. I had to keep my chewin' tobacco
in the tool-box of my car, after that, an' sneak out to the beach now
an' then an' chew where I could spit in the ocean. That's city life
for yuh!"
"When I git to thinkin' about hittin' out into the hills prospectin, or
somethin', that roll uh dough I pack stands right on its hind legs an'
says I got no excuse. I've got enough to keep me in bacon an' beans,
anyway. An' the missus gits down in the mouth when I so much as
mention minin'."
"A guy grows old fast when he quits the game and sets down to do the
grandpa-by-the-fire. First you know, a clown that thinks it's time he
took it easy is gummin' 'is grub, and shiverin' when yuh open the door,
an' takin' naps in the daytime same as babies. Let a guy once preach
he's gettin' old--"
Casey jerked the gas lever and jumped the car ahead viciously. "Well,
now, any time yuh see CASEY RYAN gummin' 'is grub an' needin' a nap
after dinner--"
"A clown GITS that way once he pulls out of the game. I've saw it
happen time an' again." The young man laughed rather irritatingly.
"Say, when I tell it to Bill Masters that Casey Ryan has plumb played
out his string an' laid down an' QUIT, by hock, and can be seen
hereafter SETTIN' WITH A SHAWL OVER HIS SHOULDERS--"
Casey nearly turned the Ford over at that insult. He jerked it back
into the road and sent it ahead again at a faster pace.
"Well, now, any time yuh see CASEY RYAN settin' with a shawl over his
shoulders--"
"Well, maybe not YOU; but the bird sure comes to it that thinks he's
too old to play the game. Why, you'll never be ready to settle down!
Take yuh twenty years from now--I'd rather bank on a pardner like you'd
be than some young clown that ain't had the experience. From the yarns
I've heard about yuh, yuh don't back down from nothing. And you're
willing to give a pardner a chance to get away with his hide on him.
I'd rather be held up by the law than by some clown that's workin' with
me."
He paused; and when he, spoke again his tone had changed to meet a
prosaic detail of the drive.
"Stop here in Victorville, will yuh, Casey? I'll take a look at the
radiator and maybe take on some more gas and oil. I've been stuck on
the desert a few times with an empty tank--and that learns a guy to
keep the top of his gas tank full and never mind the bottom."
"Good idea," said Casey shortly, his own tone relaxing its tension of a
few minutes before. "I run a garage over at Patmos once, an' the boobs
I seen creepin' in on their last spoonful uh gas--walkin' sometimes for
miles to carry gas back to where they was stalled--learnt Casey Ryan to
fill 'er up every chancet he gits."
But although the subject of age had been dropped half a mile back in
the sand, certain phrases flung at him had been barbed and had bitten
deep into Casey Ryan's self-esteem. They stung and rankled there. He
had squirmed at the picture his new friend had so ruthlessly drawn with
crude words, but bold, of doddering old age. Casey resented the
implication that he might one day fill that picture.
He began vaguely to resent the Little Woman's air of needing to protect
him from himself. Casey Ryan, he told himself boastfully, had never
needed protection from anybody. He had managed for a good many years
to get along on his own hook. The Little Woman was all right, but she
was making a mistake--a big mistake--if she thought she had to
close-herd him to keep him out of trouble.
He rolled a smoke and wished that the Little Woman would settle down
with him somewhere in the desert, where he could keep a couple of
burros and go prospecting in the hills. Where sagebrush could grow to
their very door if it wanted to, and the moon could show them long
stretches of mesa land shadowed with mystery, and then drop out of
sight behind high peaks.
He felt that he might indeed grow old fast, shut up in a city. It
occurred to him that the Little Woman was unreasonable to expect it of
him. Her idea of getting him out of town for a time, as the judge had
advised, was to send him up to San Francisco to be close-herded there.
Casey had promised to go, but now the prospect jarred. He wasn't
feeble-minded, that he knew of; it seemed natural to want to do his own
deciding now and then. When he got back home in the morning, Casey
meant to have a serious talk with the Little Woman, and get right down
to cases, and tell her that he was built for the desert, and that you
can't teach an old dog new tricks.
"They been tryin' to make Casey Ryan over into something he ain't," he
muttered under his breath, while his new friend was in the garage
office paying for the gas. "Jack an' the Little Woman's all right, but
they can't drive Casey Ryan in no town herd. Cops is cops; and they
got 'em in San Francisco same as they got 'em in L. A. If they got 'em,
I'll run agin' 'em. I'll tell 'em so, too."
The young man came out, sliding silver coins into his trousers pocket.
He glanced up and down the narrow, little street already deserted,
cranked the Ford and climbed in.
"All set," he observed cheerfully, "Let's go!"
Casey slipped his cigarette to the upper, left-hand corner of his
whimsical, Irish mouth, forced a roar out of the little engine and
whipped around the corner and across the track into the faintly lighted
road that led past shady groves and over a hill or two, and so into the
desert again.
His new friend had fallen into a meditative mood, staring out through
the windshield and whistling under his breath a pleasant little melody
of which he was probably wholly unaware. Perhaps he felt that he had
said enough to Casey just at present concerning a possible partnership.
Perhaps he even regretted having said anything at all.
Casey himself drove mechanically, his rebellious mood slipping
gradually into optimism. You can't keep Casey Ryan down for long; in
spite of his past unpleasant experiences he was presently weaving
optimistic plans of his own. The young fellow beside him seemed to
return Casey's impulsive friendship. Casey thought pleasureably of the
possibility of their driving over the desert together, sharing alike
the fortunes of the game and the adventures of the trail. Casey himself
had learned to be shy of partnerships--witness Barney Oakes!--but any
man with a drop of Irish in his blood and a bit of Irish twinkle in his
eye would turn his back on defeat and try again for a winning.
They had just passed over a hilly stretch with many turns and windings,
the moon blotted out completely now by the cloud bank. For half an hour
they had not seen any evidence that other human beings were alive in
the world. But when they went rattling across a small mesa where the
sand was deep, a car with one brilliant spotlight suddenly showed
itself around a turn just ahead of them.
Casey slowed down automatically and gave a twist to the steering wheel.
But the sand just here was deep and loose, and the front wheels of the
Ford gouged unavailingly at the sides of the ruts. Casey honked the
horn warningly and stopped full, swearing a good, Caseyish oath. The
other car, having made no apparent effort to turn out, also stopped
within a few feet of Casey, the spotlight fairly blinding him.
The young man beside Casey slid up straight in the seat and stopped
whistling. He leaned out of the car and stared ahead without the dusty
interference of the windshield.
"You can back up a few lengths and make the turn-out all right," he
suggested.
"If I can back up, so can he. He's got as much road behind him as what
I'VE got," Casey retorted stubbornly. "He never made a try at turnin'
out. I was watchin'. Any time I can't lick a road hawg, he's got a
license to lick me. Make yourself comf'table, young feller--we're
liable to set here a spell." Casey grinned. "I spent four hours on a
hill once, out-settin, a road hawg that wanted me to back up."
The man in the other car climbed out and came toward them, walking
outside the beams cast by his own glaring spotlight. He bulked rather
large in the shadows; but Casey Ryan, blinking at him through the
windshield, was still ready and willing to fight if necessary. Or, if
stubbornness were to be the test, Casey could grin and feel secure. A
little man, he reflected, can sit just as long as a big man.
The big man walked leisurely up to the car and smiled as he lifted a
foot to the running board. He leaned forward, his eyes going past
Casey to the other man.
"I kinda thought it was you, Kenner," he drawled. "How much liquor you
got aboard to-night?"
Casey, slanting a glance downward, glimpsed the barrel of a big
automatic looking toward them.
"What if I ain't got any?" the young man parried glumly. "You're
taking a lot for granted."
The big man chuckled. "If you ain't loaded with hootch, it's because
one of the boys met up with yuh before I did. Open 'er up. Lemme see
what you got."
The young fellow scowled, swore under his breath and climbed out,
turning toward the loaded tonneau with reluctant obedience.
"I can't argue with the law," he said, as he began to pull out a roll
of bedding wedged in tightly. "But, for cripes sake, go as easy as you
can. I'm plumb lame from my last fall!"
The big man chuckled again. "The law's merciful as, it can afford to
be, and I've got a heart like an ox. Got any jack on yuh?"
"I'm just about cleaned, and that's the Gawd's truth. Have a heart,
can't yuh? A man's got t' live."
"Slip me five hundred, anyway. How much is your load?"
"Sixty gallons--bottled, most of it. Two kegs in bulk." Young Kenner
was proceeding stoically with the unloading. Casey, his mouth clamped
tight shut, was glaring stupifiedly straight out through the windshield.
"Pile out thirty gallons of the bottled goods by that bush. You can
keep the kegs." The big man's eyes shifted to Casey Ryan's
expressionless profile and dwelt there curiously.
"Seems like I know you," he said abruptly. "Ain't you the guy that was
brought in with that Black Butte bunch of moonshiners and got off on
account of a nice wife and an L. A. alibi? Sure you are! Casey Ryan.
I got yuh placed now." He threw back his head and laughed.
Casey might have been an Indian making a society call for all the sign
of life he gave. Young Kenner, having deposited his camp outfit in a
heap on the ground, began lifting out tall, round bottles, four at a
time and ricking them neatly beside the large sagebush indicated by the
officer.
Standing upon the running board at Casey's shoulder where he had a
clear view, the big man watched the unloading and at the same time kept
an eye on Casey. It was perfectly evident that for all his easy good
nature, he was not a man who could be talked out of his purpose.
"All right, pile in your blankets," the big man ordered at last, and
young Kenner unemotionally began to reload the camp outfit. The big
man's attention shifted to Casey again. He looked at him curiously and
grinned.
"Say, that's a good one you pulled! You had all the county officials
bluffed into thinking you were the victim of that Black Butte bunch,
instead of being in cahoots. That alibi of yours was a bird. Does
Kenner, here, know you hit the hootch pretty strong at times?
Bootlegging's bad business for a man that laps it up the way you do.
Where's that piece of change, Kenner?"
"Aw, can't yuh find some way to leave me jack enough to buy gas and
grub?" Young Kenner asked sullenly, reaching into his pocket. The big
man shook his head.
"I'm doing a lot for you boys, when I let yuh get past me with the
Lizzie, to say nothing of half your load. I'd ought to trundle yuh
back to San Berdoo; you both know that as well as I do. I'm too
soft-hearted for this job, anyway. Hand over the roll."
Young Kenner swore and extended his arm behind Casey. "That leaves me
six bits," he growled, as the big man dropped something into his coat
pocket. "You might give me back ten, anyway."
"Couldn't possibly. I have to have something to square myself with if
this leaks out. Just back up, till you can get around my car. Turn to
the left where the sand ain't so deep and you ain't likely to run over
the booze."
With the big man still standing at his shoulder on the running board,
Casey Ryan did what he had rashly declared he never would do; he backed
the Ford, turned it to the left as he had been commanded to do, and
drove around the other car. It was bitter work for Casey; but even he
recognized the fact that the "settin'" was not good that evening. Back
in the road again, he stopped when he was told to stop, and waited,
with a surface calm altogether strange to Casey, while the officer
stepped off and gave a bit of parting advice.
"Better keep right on going, boys. I'd hate to see yuh get in trouble,
so you'd better take this old road up ahead here. That'll bring yuh out
at Dagget and you'll miss Barstow altogether. I just came from there;
there's a hard gang hanging around on the lookout for anything they can
pick up. Don't get caught again. On your way!"
Casey drove for half a mile still staring straight before him. Then
young Kenner laughed shortly.
"That's Smilin' Lou," he said. "He's a mean boy to monkey with. Talk
about road hawgs--he's one yuh can't outset!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"So that's the kind uh game yuh asked me to set in on!" Casey broke
another long silence. He had felt in his bones that young Kenner was
watching him secretly, waiting for him to take his stand for or against
the proposition.
"I'd like to know who passed the word around amongst outlaws that Casey
Ryan is the only original easy mark left runnin' wild, an' that he can
be caught an' made a goat of any time it's handy! Look at the crowd of
folks bunched on that crossing this afternoon! Why didn't yuh pick some
one else for the goat? Outa all them hundreds uh people, why'n hell
did yuh have to go an' pick on Casey Ryan? Ain't he had trouble enough
tryin' to keep outa trouble?
"Naw! Casey Ryan's went an' blowed hisself to show tickets, an' he's
headed home, peaceful an' on time, so's he can shave an' put on a clean
collar an' slick up to please his wife an' take 'er to the show!
Nothin' agin the law in that! Not a damn' thing yuh can haul 'im to
jail fer! So YOU had to come along, loaded to the guards with
hootch--stall your Ford on the car track right under m' nose, an' tell
Casey Ryan to git in! Couldn't leave 'im to go home peaceful to 'is
wife--naw! You had t' haul 'im away out here an' git 'im in wrong with
a cop agin! That's a fine game you're playin'! That's a DARNED fine
game!"
"Sure, it is! It's better than the game you've been playing," young
Kenner stated calmly. "Take your own story, for instance. You've been
dubbin' along, tryin' t' play the way the law tells you to. An' the
saps has been flockin' to yuh like a bunch uh hornets--every bird
tryin' t' sink his stinger in first. Ain't that right?
"Keepin' the law has laid yuh in jail twice in the last month, by your
own tell. Why, a clown like you, that's aimin' t' keep the law an'
live honest, is the easiest mark in the world. Them's the guys that do
the most harm--they make graftin' so darned easy! Them's the guys the
saps lay for and dust off regular in the shape of fines an' taxes an'
the like uh that. Oncet in awhile they'll snatch yuh fer somethin' yuh
never done at all an' lay yuh away fer a day or two, just t' keep yuh
scared and easy t' handle next time.
"Now, yuh take me, fer instance. I play agin' the law--an' I'm
cleanin' up right along, and have yet to take my morning sunlight in
streaks. I know as much about the inside of a jail as I know about the
White House--an' no more. I've hauled hootch all over the country, an'
I never yet was dusted off so hard by the law that I didn't come
through with a roll uh jack they'd overlooked.
"Take this highjackin' to-night, for instance. Look what Smilin' Lou
took off'n me! And yet," Kenner turned and grinned impudently at
Casey, "don't never think I didn't come out a long jump ahead! I carry
nothin' cheap; nothin' but good whisky an' brandy that the liquor
houses failed to declare when the world went dry. Then there's real,
honest-to-gosh European stuff run in from Mexico; now you're in, Casey,
I'll tell yuh the snap. When I said easy money, I was in my right mind.
"You can count on highjackers leavin' yuh half your load; mebby a
little more, if yuh set purty. They don't aim t' force yuh out uh the
business. They grab what the traffic'll bear, an' let yuh go on an
make a profit so you'll stay.
"Now there's a card you can slip up your sleeve for this game. Yuh load
in the best stuff first--see? Anything real special you wanta put in
kegs with double sides an' ends which you fill with moonshine. Yuh
never can tell--they might wanta sample it. Smilin' Lou did once--an'
you notice to-night he left the kegs be. So they get a good grade of
whisky from the liquor houses. And they pass up the best, imported
stuff that can be got to-day. We'll have regular customers for that;
and you can gamble they'll pay the price!" He laughed at some secret
joke which he straightway shared with Casey.
"You noticed I got my gas-tank behind--a twenty-gallon tank at that.
Well, what if I tell yuh that right under this front seat there's a
false bottom to the tool-box and under that--well, suppose you're
settin' on forty pints uh French champagne? More'n all that, this
cushion we're settin' on has got a concealed pocket down both
sides--for hop. So yuh see, Casey, a man can make an honest livin' at
this game, even if he's highjacked every trip. Now you're in, I can
show yuh all kinds uh tricks."
The muscles, along Casey's jaw had hardened until they looked bunched.
His eyes, fixed upon the winding trail in front of him, were a pale,
unwinking glitter.
"Who says I'm in? Yuh ain't heard Casey Ryan say it yet, have yuh? Yuh
better wait till Casey says he's in b'fore yuh bank on 'im too strong.
Casey may be an easy mark--he may be the officious goat pro tem of
every darn' bootlegger an' moonshiner an' every darn' cop that crosses
his trail; but you can ask anybody if Casey Ryan don't do 'is own
decidin'!
"Before you go any further, young feller, I'll tell yuh just how fur
Casey's in your game--an' that's as fur as Barstow. When Casey says
he'll do a thing he comes purty near doin' it. I ain't playin' no
bootleg game, young feller; White Mule an' me ain't an' never was trail
pardners. Make me choose between bootleggers an' cops, an' I'd have to
flip a dollar on it. Only fer Bill Masters bein' your friend, I dunno
but what I'd take yuh right back with me t' L. A. an' let yuh sleep in
a jail oncet--seein' you've never had the pleasure!"
The young man laughed imperturbably. "Flip that dollar for me, Casey,
to see whether I shoot yuh now an' dump yuh out in the brush
somewheres, or make yuh play the hootch game an' like it. Why, you
didn't think for one minute, did yuh, that I was takin' any chance with
you? Not a chance in the world! Go squeal to the law--an' what would
it get yuh?
"You was drivin' this car yourself when Smilin' Lou stopped us,
recollect. He had yuh placed as one of that Black Butte gang quick as
he lamped yuh. Yuh think Smilin' Lou is goin' to take a chance? You
was caught with the goods t'night, old-timer, an' it's the second time
inside a month. It'd be the third time you an' the law has tangled.
Why, you set there yourself an' told me how you was practically run
outa L. A., right this week. You set still a minute and figure out
about how many years they'd give yuh!
"How come Smilin' Lou overlooked cleanin' yuh of your roll when he took
mine, do yuh think? He was treatin' yuh white, an' givin' yuh a chance
to come back strong next time--that's why. They got so much on yuh now
after to-night, that he knows you got just one chance to sidestep a
stretch in the pen. That's to play the game with pertection. Smilin'
Lou never to my knowledge throwed down a guy that come through on
demand.
"Smilin' Lou stood there an' sized yuh up about the same as I did,
somethin' like this: 'Here Is Casey Ryan--a clown that's safe anywhere
in the desert States. He got honest prospector wrote all over 'im.
Why, if you boarded a street car the conductor would be guessin',
wild-eyed, how much gold dust it takes to make a nickel, expectin' you
to haul out your poke an' look around fer the gold scales. Why, you
could git by where a town guy couldn't. You've got a rep a mile long as
a fightin', squareshootin' Irishman that's a drivin' fool an' knows the
desert like he knows ham-an'-eggs. Tie on some picks an' shovels an'
put you behind the wheel, and only the guys that are in the know would
ever get wise in a thousand years.
"Why, look what he said about you havin' 'em all bluffed in San Berdoo!
Grabbed you with a bunch uh moonshiners, and you fightin' the saps
harder'n any of 'em--and then, by heck, you slips the noose an' leaves
'em thinkin' you're honest but unlucky.
"So you 'n' me is pardners till I say when. We'll clean up some real
jack together. Minin' ain't in it, no more, with hootch runnin'--if
yuh play it right. The good old White Mule goes under the wire,
old-timer, an' takes the money. Burros is extinct."
"Burros ain't any extincter than what you'll be when I git through with
yuh," gritted Casey savagely, shutting off the gas. "Bill Masters can
like it or not--I'm goin' to lick the livin' tar outa you here an' now.
When I'm through with yuh, if you're able to wiggle the wheel, yuh can
take your load uh hootch an' go tahell! I'll hoof it down here to the
next station on the railroad an' ketch a ride back to L. A."
Kenner laughed. "An' what would I be doin', you poor nut? Set here
meek till yuh tell me to git out an' take a lickin'? Yuh feel that gun
proddin' yuh in the ribs, don't yuh? I can't help wonderin' how your
wife would feel towards you if you was found with a hole drilled
through your middle, an' a carload uh booze. That'd jar the faith of
the most believin' woman on earth. You take this cut-off road up here
an' drive till I tell yuh t' stop. As you may know, a man can't be
chickenhearted and peddle hootch--an' I'm called an expert. So you
think that over, Casey--an' drive purty, see?"
Casey drove as "purty" as was possible with a six-shooter pressed
irritatingly against his lowest floating rib; but he did not dwell upon
the spectacle of himself found dead with a carload of booze. He wished
to heaven he hadn't let the Little Woman talk him out of packing a gun,
and waited for his chance.
Young Kenner was thoughtful, brooding through the hours of darkness
with his head slightly bent and his eyes, so far as Casey could
determine, fixed steadily on the uneven trail where the headlights
revealed every rut, every stone, every chuck-hole. But Casey was not
deceived by that quiescence. The revolver barrel never once ceased its
pressure against his side, and he knew that young Kenner never for an
instant forgot that he was riding with Casey Ryan at the wheel, waiting
for a chance to kill him.
By daylight, such was Casey's driving, they were well down the highway
which leads to Needles and on through Arizona. Casey was just thinking
that they would soon run out of gas, and that he would then have a
fighting chance, when he was startled almost into believing that he had
spoken his plan.
"I told you there's a twenty-gallon tank on this car; well, it holds
twenty-five. I've got a special carburetor that gives an actual
mileage of twenty-two miles to the gallon on ordinary desert roads. I
filled 'er till she run over at Victorville--and I notice you're easy
on the gas with your drivin'. Figure it yourself, Casey, and don't be
countin' on a stop till I'm ready t' stop."
Casey grunted, more crestfallen than he would ever admit. But he hadn't
given up; the give-up quality had been completely forgotten when
Casey's personality was being put together. He drove on, around the
rubbly base of a blackened volcano long since cold and bleak, and bored
his way through the sandy stretch that leads through Patmos.
Patmos was a place of unhappy memories, but he drove through the little
hamlet so fast that he scarcely thought of his unpleasant sojourn there
the summer before. Young Kenner had fallen silent again and they drove
the sixty miles or so to Goffs with not a word spoken between them.
Casey spent most of that time in mentally cursing the Ford for its
efficiency. He had prayed for blowouts, a fouled timer, for something
or anything or everything to happen that could possibly befall a Ford.
He couldn't even make the radiator boil. Worst and most persistent of
his discomforts was the hard pressure of that six-shooter against his
side. Casey was positive that the imprint of it would be worn as a
permanent brand upon his person for the rest of his life. Young
Kenner's voice speaking to him came so abruptly that Casey jumped.
"I've been thinking over your case," Kenner said cheerfully. "Stop
right here while we talk it over."
Casey stopped right there.
"I've changed my mind about havin' you for a pardner," young Kenner
went on. "You'd be a valuable man all right; but when a harp like you
gets stubborn-bitter, my hunch tells me to break away clean. You're a
mick--an' micks is all alike when they git a grudge. I can't be
bothered keepin' yuh under my eye all the time, and the way I've felt
yuh oozin' venom all this while shows me I'd have to. An' bumpin' yuh
off would be neither pleasant ner safe.
"Now, the way I've doped this out, I'm goin' to sell yuh the outfit
fer just what jack yuh got in your clothes. Fork it over, an' I'll
give yuh the layout just as she stands."
"Yuh better wait till Casey says he wants t' buy!" Swallowing
resentment all night had made his voice husky; and it was bitter indeed
to sit still and hear himself called a harp and a mick.
"Why wait? Hand over the roll, and that closes the deal. I didn't ask
yuh would yuh buy--I'm givin' yuh somethin' fer your money, is all. I
could take it off yuh after yuh quit kickin' and drive your remains in
to this little burg, with a tale of how I'd caught a bootlegger that
resisted arrest. So fork over the jack, old-timer. I want to catch
that train over there that's about ready to pull out." He prodded
sharply with the gun, and Casey heard a click which needed no
explanation.
Casey fumbled for a minute inside his vest and glumly "forked over."
Young Kenner inspected the folded bank notes, smiled and slipped the
flat bundle inside his shirt.
"You're stronger on the bank roll than what yuh let on," he remarked
contentedly. "I don't stand to lose so much, after all. Sixteen
hundred, I make it. What's in your pants pockets?"
Casey, still balefully silent, emptied first one pocket and then the
other into Kenner's cupped palm. With heavy sarcasm he felt in his
watch pocket and produced a nickel slipped there after paying
street-car fare. He held it out to young Kenner between his finger and
thumb, still gazing straight before him.
Young Kenner took it and grinned. "Oh, well--you're rich! Drive on
now, and when you get about even with that caboose, slow to twelve
miles whilst I hop off; and then hit 'er up again an' keep 'er goin'.
If yuh don't, I'll grab yuh fer a bootlegger, sure. And I'd have the
hull train crew to help me wrassle yuh down. They'd be willin' to
sample the evidence, I guess, an' be witnesses against yuh. An' bear
in mind, Casey, that yuh got a darned good Ford and all its valuable
contents for sixteen hundred and some odd bucks. If you meet up with
the law, you can treat 'em white an' still break even on the deal yuh
just consummated with me."
"Like hell I consummated the deal!" Casey was goaded into muttering.
He drove abreast of the caboose, and at a final prod in the ribs Casey
slowed down. Young Kenner dropped off the running board, alighted
running with his body slanted backwards and his lips smiling
friendly-wise.
"Don't take any bad money--an' don't let 'em catch yuh!" he cried
mockingly, as he headed for the caboose.
At a crossing, two miles farther on, Casey came larruping out of the
sand hills and was forced to wait while the freight train went rattling
past, headed east on a downhill grade.
Young Kenner, up in the cupola, leaned far out and waved his hat as the
caboose flicked by.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The highway north from the Santa Fe Railroad just west of Needles
climbs an imperceptible grade across barren land to where the mesa
changes and becomes potentially fertile. Up this road, going north, a
cloud of yellow dust rolled swiftly. See at close range, the nose of a
dingy Ford protruded slightly in front of the enveloping cloud--and
behind it Casey Ryan, hard-eyed and with his jaw set to the fighting
mood, gripped the wheel and drove as if he had a grudge against the
road.
At the first signpost Casey canted a malevolent eye upward and went
lurching by at top speed. The car bulked black for a moment, dimmed,
and merged into the fleeing cloud that presently seemed no more than a
dust-devil whirling across the mesa. At the second signpost Casey
slowed, his eyes dwelling speculatively upon the legend:
"JUNIPER WELLS 3 M"
The arrow pointed to the right where a narrow, little-used trail angled
crookedly away through the greasewood. Casey gave a deciding twist to
the steering wheel and turned into the trail.
Juniper Wells is not nearly so nice a place as it sounds. But it is
the first water north of the Santa Fe, and now and then a wayfarer of
the desert leaves the main highway and turns that way, driven by
necessity. It is a secluded spot, too unattractive to tempt people to
linger; because of its very seclusion it therefore tempted Casey Ryan.
When a man has driven a Ford fifteen hours without once leaving the
wheel or taking a drink of water or a mouthful of food, however great
his trouble or his haste, his first thought will be of water, food and
rest. Even Casey's deadly rage at the diabolical trick played upon him
could not hold his thoughts from dwelling upon bacon and coffee and a
good sleep afterwards.
Wind and rain and more wind, buffeting that trail since the last car
had passed, made "heavy going." The Ford labored up small hills and
across gullies, dipping downward at last to Juniper Wells; there Casey
stopped close beside the blackened embers left by some forgotten
traveler of the wild. He slid stiffly from behind the wheel to the
vacant seat beside him, and climbed out like the old man he had last
night determined never to become. He walked away a few paces, turned
and stood glaring back at the car as if familiarizing himself with an
object little known and hated much.
Fate, he felt, had played a shabby trick upon an honest man. Here he
stood, a criminal in the eyes of the law, a liar in the eyes of the
missus. An honest man and a truthful, here he was--he, Casey
Ryan--actually afraid to face his fellow men.
"HE wasn't no friend of Bill Masters; the divil himself wouldn'ta owned
him fer a friend!" snarled Casey, thinking of Kenner. "Me--CASEY
RYAN!--with a load uh booze wished onto me--and a car that may have
been stolen fer all I know--an' not a darn' nickel to my name! They can
make a goat uh Casey Ryan once, but watch clost when they try it the
second time! Casey MAY be gittin' old; he might possibly have
softenin' of the brain; but he'll git the skunk that done this, or
you'll find his carcass layin' alongside the trail bleachin' like a
blowed-out tire! I'll trail 'im till my tongue hangs down to my knees!
I'll git 'im an' I'll drown 'im face down in a bucket of his own
booze!" Whipped by emotion, his voice rose stridently until it cracked
just under a shout.
"That sounds pretty businesslike, old man," a strange voice spoke
whimsically behind Casey. "Who's all this you're going to trail till
your tongue hangs down to your knees? Going to need any help?"
Casey whirled belligerently upon the man who had walked quietly up
behind him.
"Where the hell did YOU come from?" he countered roughly.
"Does it matter? I'm here," the other parried blandly. "But by the
way! If you've got the makings of a meal in your car--and you look too
old a hand in the desert to be without grub--I won't refuse to have a
snack with you. I hate to invite myself to breakfast, but it's that or
go hungry--and an empty belly won't stand on ceremony."
The hard-bitten features of Casey Ryan, tanned as they were by wind and
sun to a fair imitation of leather, were never meant to portray mixed
emotions. His face, therefore, remained impassive except for a queer,
cornered look in his eyes. With a sick feeling at the pit of his
stomach he wondered just how much of his impassioned soliloquy the man
had overheard; who and what this man was, and how he had managed to
approach within six feet of Casey without being overheard. With a
sicker feeling, he wondered if there were any grub in the car; and if
so, how he could get at it without revealing his contraband load to
this stranger.
But Casey Ryan was nothing if not game. He reached for his trusty plug
of tobacco and pried off a corner with his teeth. He lifted his left
hand mechanically to the back of his head and pushed his black felt hat
forward so that it rested over his right eyebrow at a devil-may-care
angle. These preparations made involuntarily and unconsciously, Casey
Ryan was himself again.
"All right--if you're willin' to rustle the wood an' start a fire, I'll
see if I can dig up somethin'." He cocked an eye up at the sun. "I et
my breakfast long enough ago so I guess it's settled. I reckon mebby I
c'd take on some bacon an' coffee myself. Feller I had along with me I
ditched, back here at the railroad. He done the packin' up--an' I'd
hate to swear to what he put in an' what he left out. Onery cuss--I
wouldn't put nothin' past him. But mebby we can make out a meal."
The stranger seemed perfectly satisfied with this arrangement and
studied preamble. He started off to gather dead branches of
greasewood; and Casey, having prepared the way for possible
disappointment, turned toward the car.
Fear and Casey Ryan have ever been strangers; yet he was conscious of a
distinct, prickly chill down his spine. The glance he cast over his
shoulder at the stranger betrayed uneasiness, best he could do. He
turned over the roll of bedding and cautiously began a superficial
search which he hoped would reveal grub in plenty--without revealing
anything else. He wished now that he had taken a look over his
shoulder when young Kenner was unloading the car at Smiling Lou's
command. He would be better prepared now for possible emergencies. He
remembered, with a bit of comfort, that the bootlegger had piled a good
deal of stuff upon the ground before Casey first heard the clink of
bottles.
A grunt of relief signaled his location of a box containing grub. A
moment later he lifted out a gunny sack bulging unevenly with cooking
utensils. He fished a little deeper, turned back a folded tarp and
laid naked to his eyes the top of a whisky keg. With a grunt of
consternation he hastily replaced the tarp, his heart flopping in his
chest like a fresh-landed fish.
The stranger was kneeling beside a faintly crackling little pile of
twigs, his face turned inquiringly toward Casey. Casey, glancing
guiltily over his shoulder, felt the chill hand of discovery reaching
for his very soul. It was as if a dead man were hidden away beneath
that tarp. It seemed to him that the eyes of the stranger were sharp,
suspicious eyes, and that they dwelt upon him altogether too
attentively for a perfectly justifiable interest even in the box of
grub.
Black coffee, drunk hot and strong, gave the world a brighter aspect.
Casey decided that the situation was not so desperate, after all. Easy
enough to bluff it out--easiest thing in the world! He would just go
along as if there wasn't a thing on his mind heavier than his thinning,
sandy hair. No man living had any right or business snooping around in
his car, unless he carried a badge of an officer of the law. Even with
the badge, Casey told himself sternly, a man would have to show a
warrant before he could touch a finger to his outfit.
Over his third cup of coffee Casey eyed the stranger guardedly. He did
not look like an officer. He was not big and burly, with arrogant eyes
and the hint of leashed authority in his tone. Instead, he was of
medium height, owned a pair of shrewd gray eyes and an easy drawl, and
was dressed in the half military style so popular with mining men,
surveyors and others who can afford to choose what garb they will adopt
for outdoor living.
He had shown a perfect familiarity with cooking over a campfire, and
had fried the bacon in a manner which even Casey could not criticize.
Before the coffee was boiled he had told Casey that his name was Mack
Nolan. Immediately afterward he had grinned and added the superfluous
information that he was Irish and didn't care who knew it.
"Well, I'm Irish, meself," Casey returned approvingly and with more
than his usual brogue. "You can ask anybody if Casey Ryan has ever
showed shame fer the blood that's in' 'im. 'Tis the Irish that never
backs up from a rough trail or a fight." He poured a fourth cup of
coffee into a chipped enamel cup and took his courage in his two hands.
Mack Nolan, he assured himself optimistically, couldn't possibly know
what lay hidden under the camp outfit in the Ford. Until he did know,
he was harmless as anybody, so long as Casey kept an eye on him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
During the companionable smoke that followed breakfast, Casey learned
that Mack Nolan had spent some time in Nevada, ambling through the
hills, examining the geologic formation of the country with a view to
possible future prospecting in districts yet undeveloped.
"The mineral possibilities of Nevada haven't been more than scratched,"
Mack Nolan observed, lying back with one arm thrown up under his head
as a makeshift pillow and the other hand negligently attending to the
cigarette he was smoking. His gray army hat was tilted over his eyes,
shielding them from the sun while they dwelt rather studiously upon the
face of Casey Ryan.
"Every spring I like to get out and poke around through these hills
where folks as a rule don't go. Never did much prospecting--as such.
Don't take kindly enough to a pick and shovel for that. What I like
best is general field work. If I run across something rich, time
enough then to locate a claim or two and hire a couple of strong backs
to do the digging.
"I've been out now for about three weeks; and night before last, just
as I stopped to make camp and before I'd started to unpack, my two
mules got scared at a rattler and quit the country. Left me flat,
without a thing but my clothes and six-shooter, and what I had in my
pockets." He lifted the cigarette from between his lips--thin, they
were, and curved and rather pitiless, one could guess, if the man were
sufficiently roused.
"I wasted all yesterday trying to trail 'em. But you can't do much
tracking in these rocks back here toward the river. I was hitting for
the highway to catch a ride if I could, when I saw you topping this
last ridge over here. Don't blame me much for bumming a breakfast, do
you?" And he added, with a sigh of deep physical content, "It sure-lee
was some feed!"
His lids drooped lower as if sleep were overtaking him in spite of
himself. "I'd ask yuh if you'd seen anything of those mules--only I
don't give a damn now. I wish this was night instead of noon; I could
sleep the clock around after that bacon and bannock of yours. Haven't
a care in the world," he murmured drowsily. "Happy as a toad in the
sun, first warm day of spring. How soon you going to crank up?"
Casey stared at him unwinkingly through narrowed lids. He pushed his
hat forward with a sharp tilt over his eyebrow--which meant always that
Casey Ryan had just O. K.'d an idea--and reached for his chewing
tobacco.
"Go ahead an' take a nap if yuh want to," he urged. "I got some
tinkerin' to do on the Ford, an' I was aimin' to lay over here an' do
it. I'm kinda lookin' around, myself, for a likely prospect; I got all
the time there is. I guess I'll back the car down the draw a piece
where she'll set level, an' clean up 'er dingbats whilst you take a
sleep."
Casey left the breakfast things where they were, as a silent
reassurance to Mack Nolan that the car would not go off without him. It
was a fine, psychological detail of which Casey was secretly rather
proud. A box of grub, a smoked coffee pot and dirty breakfast dishes
left beside a dead campfire establishes evidence, admissible before any
jury, that the owner means to return.
Casey went over and cranked the Ford, grimly determined to make the
coffee pot lie for him if necessary. He backed the car down the draw a
good seventy-five yards, to where a wrinkle in the bank hid him from
the breakfast camp. He stopped there and left the engine running while
he straddled out over the side and went forward to the dip of the front
fender to see if the Ford were still visible to Mack Nolan. He was
glad to find that by crouching and sighting across the fender he could
just see the campfire and the top of Nolan's hat beyond it. The man
need only lift his head off his arm to see that the Ford was standing
just around the turn of the draw.
"The corner was never yet so tight that Casey Ryan couldn't find a
crack somewhere to crawl through," he told himself vaingloriously. "An'
I hope to thunder the feller sleeps long an' sleeps solid!"
For fifteen minutes the mind of Casey Ryan was at ease. He had found a
shovel in the car, placed conveniently at the side where it could be
used for just such an emergency as this. For fifteen minutes he had
been using that shovel in a shelving bank of loose gravel just under an
outcropping of rhyolite a rod or so behind the car and well out of
sight of Nolan.
He was beginning to consider his excavation almost deep enough to bury
two ten-gallon kegs and forty bottles of whisky, when the shadow of a
head and shoulders fell across the hole. Casey did not lift the dirt
and rocks he had on his shovel. He froze to a tense quiet, goggling at
the shadow.
"What are yuh doing, Casey? Trying to outdig a badger?" Mack Nolan's
chuckle was friendliness itself.
Casey's head snapped around so that he could cock an eye up at Nolan.
He grinned mechanically. "Naw. Picked up a rich-lookin' piece uh
float. Thought I'd just see if it didn't mebby come from this ledge."
Mack Nolan stepped forward interestedly and looked at the ledge.
"Where's the piece you found?" he very naturally inquired. "The
formation just here wouldn't lead me to expect gold-bearing rock; but
of course, anything is possible with gold. Let's have a look at the
specimen."
Casey had once tried to bluff a stranger with two deuces and a pair of
fives, and two full stacks of blue chips pushed to the center to back
the bluff. The stranger had called him, with three queens and a pair
of jacks. Casey felt like that now.
He had laughed over his loss then, and he grinned now and reached
carelessly to the bank beside him as if he fully expected to lay his
hand on the specimen of gold-bearing rock. He went so far as to utter
a surprised oath when he failed to find it. He felt in his pockets.
He went forward and scanned the top of the ledge almost convincingly.
He turned and stood a-straddle, his hands on his hips, and gazed on the
pile of dirt he had thrown out of the hole. Last, he pushed his hat
back so that with the next movement he could push it forward again over
his eyebrow.
"Now if that there lump uh high-grade ain't went an' slid down the bank
an' got covered up with the muck!" he exclaimed disgustedly. "I'm a son
of a gun if Fate ain't playin' agin' Casey Ryan with a flock uh aces
under its vest!"
Mack Nolan laughed, and Casey slanted a look his way. "Thought I left
you takin, a nap," he said brazenly. "What's the matter? Didn't your
breakfast set good?"
Mack Nolan laughed again. It was evident that he found Casey Ryan very
amusing.
"The breakfast was fine," he replied easily. "A couple of lizards got
to playing tag over me. That woke me up, and the sun was so hot I just
thought I'd come down and crawl into the car and go to sleep there. Go
ahead with your prospecting, Casey--I won't bother you."
Casey went on with his digging, but his heart was not in it. With every
laggard shovelful of dirt, he glanced over his shoulder apprehensively,
watching Mack Nolan crawl into the back of the car and settle himself,
with an audible sigh of satisfaction, on top of the load. He had one
wild, wicked impulse to lengthen the hole and make it serve as a grave
for more than bootleg whisky; but it was an impulse born of
desperation, and it died almost before it had lived.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Casey left his digging and returned to the Ford, still determined to
carry on the bluff and pretend that much tinkering was necessary before
he could travel further. With a great show of industry he rummaged for
pliers and wrenches, removed the hood from the motor and squinted down
at the little engine.
By that time Mack Nolan was snoring softly in deep slumber. Casey
listened suspiciously, knowing too well how misleading a snore could
be. But his own eyelids were growing exceeding heavy, and the
soporific sound acted hypnotically upon his sleep-hungry brain. He
caught himself yawning, and suddenly threw down the wrench.
"Aw, hell!" he muttered disgustedly, and went and crawled under the
back of the car where it was shady.
The sun was nearly down when Casey awoke and crawled out. Mack Nolan
was still curled comfortably in the car, his back against the bed roll.
He opened his eyes and yawned when Casey leaned and looked in upon him.
"By Jove, that was a fine sleep I had," he announced cheerfully,
lifting himself up and dangling his legs outside the car. "Strike
anything yet?"
"Naw." Casey's grunt was eloquent of the mood he was in.
"Get the car fixed all right?" Mack Nolan's cheerfulness seemed
nothing less than diabolical to Casey.
"Naw." Then Casey added grimly, "I'm stuck. I dunno what ails the
damned thing. Have to send to Vegas fer new parts, I guess. It's only
three miles out here to the road. Mebby you better hike over to the
highway an' ketch a ride with somebody. I might send in for a timer
an' some things, too. No use waitin' fer me, Nolan--can't tell how
long I'll be held up here."
Mack Nolan climbed out of the car. Casey's spirits rose instantly.
Nolan came forward and looked down at the engine as casually as he
would glance at a nickel alarm clock.
"She was hitting all right when you backed down here," Nolan remarked
easily. "I'll just take a look at her myself. Fords are cranky
sometimes. But I've assembled too many of them in the factory to let
one get the best of me in the desert."
Casey could almost hear his heart when it slumped down into his boots.
But he wasn't licked yet.
"Aw, let the darned thing alone till we eat," he said, pushing his hat
forward to hurry his wits.
"Well--I can throw a Ford together in the dark, if necessary," smiled
Mack Nolan. "Eat, it is, if you want it that way. That breakfast I put
away seems to have sharpened my appetite for supper. Tell you what,
Ryan. I'll do a little trouble-shooting here while you cook supper.
How'll that be?"
That wouldn't be, if Casey could prevent it. His pale, narrow-lidded
eyes dwelt upon Nolan unwinkingly.
"Well, mebby I'm kind of a crank about my car," he hedged, with a
praiseworthy calmness. "Fords is like horses, to me. I drove stage all
m' life till I took to prospectin'--an' I never could stand around and
let anybody else monkey with my teams. I ain't a doubt in the world,
Mr. Nolan, but what you know as much about Fords as I do. More, mebby.
But Casey Ryan's got 'is little ways, an' he can't seem to ditch 'em.
We'll eat; an' then mebby we'll look 'er over together.
"At the same time," he went on with rising courage, "I'm liable to
stick around here for awhile an' prospect a little. If you wanta find
them mules an' outfit, don't bank too strong on Casey Ryan. He's liable
to change 'is mind any old time. Day or night, you can't tell what
Casey might take a notion to do. That there's a fact. You can ask
anybody if it ain't."
Mack Nolan laughed and slapped Casey unexpectedly on the shoulder.
"You're a man after my own heart, Casey Ryan," he declared
enigmatically. "I'll stick to you and take a chance. Darn the mules!
Somebody will find them and look after them until I show up."
Casey's spirits, as he admitted to himself, were rising and falling
like the hammer of a pile driver; and like the pile driver, the hammer
was driving him deeper and deeper into hopelessness. He would have
given an ear to know for certain whether Mack Nolan were as innocent
and friendly as he seemed. Until he did know, Casey could see nothing
before him but to wait his chance to give Nolan the slip.
Sitting cross-legged in the glow of the campfire after supper, with a
huge pattern of stars drawn over the purple night sky, Casey pulled out
the old pipe with which he had solaced many an evening and stuffed it
thoughtfully with tobacco. Across the campfire, Mack Nolan sat with
his hat tilted down over his eyes, smoking a cigarette and seeming at
peace with all the world.
Casey hoped that Nolan would forget about fixing the Ford. He hoped
that Nolan would sleep well to-night. Casey was perfectly willing to
sacrifice a good roll of bedding and the cooking outfit for the
privilege of traveling alone. No man, he told himself savagely, could
ask a better deal than he was prepared to give Nolan. He bent to reach
a burning twig for his pipe, and found Nolan watching him steadily from
under his hat brim.
"What sort of looking fellows were those, Ryan, that left a load of
booze on your hands?" Nolan asked casually when he saw that he was
observed.
Casey burned his fingers with the blazing twig. "Who said anything
about any fellers leavin' me booze?" he evaded sharply. "If it's a
drink you're hintin' for, you won't get it. Casey Ryan ain't no booze
peddler, an' now's as good a time as any to let that soak into your
system."
Mack Nolan's gray eyes were still watching Casey with a steadfastness
that was disconcerting to a man in Casey's dilemma.
"It might help us both considerably," he said quietly, "if you told me
all about it. You can't cache that booze you've got in the car--I
won't let you, for one thing; for another, that would be merely dodging
the issue, and if you'll forgive my frankness, dodging doesn't seem to
be quite in your line."
Casey puffed hard on his pipe. "The world's gittin' so darned full uh
crooks, a man can't turn around now'days without bumpin' into a few!"
he exploded bitterly. "What kind uh hold-up game YOU playin', Mr.
Nolan? If that's your name," he added fiercely.
Mack Nolan laughed to himself and rubbed the ash from his cigarette
against the sole of his shoe. "Why," he answered genially, "my game is
holding up bootleggers--and crooked cops. Speaking off-hand (which I
don't often do) I should say you have a fine chance to sit in with me.
I'm just guessing, now," he added dryly, "but I'm tolerably good at
guessing; a man's got to be, these days."
"A man's got to do better than guess--with Casey Ryan," Casey remarked
ominously. "The last man that guessed Casey Ryan, guessed 'im plumb
wrong."
"Meaning that you'd refuse to help me round up bootleggers and the
officers that protect them?" A steel edge crept into Mack Nolan's
voice. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his eyes boring
into Casey's mind.
"Man, don't stall with me! You've got brains enough to know that if I
were a crook I'd have held you up long before now. You gave me three
splendid opportunities to stick a gun in your back--and I could have
made others. And," he added with a smile, "if I had thought that you
were a bootlegger or a crook of any other kind, I'd have had you in Las
Vegas jail by this time. You're no more a crook than I am. You've got
neither the looks nor the actions of a slicker. I may say I know you
pretty well--"
Casey thrust out a pugnacious chin. "Say! D' you know Bill Masters,
too? That's all I wanta know!"
"Bill Masters? Why, is he the fellow who stepped out from under this
load of hootch? If he is, he must have picked himself a new name; I
never heard it."
Casey glared suspiciously for twenty seconds before he settled back
glumly into his mental corner.
"Ryan, I've been all day sizing you up. I'm going to be perfectly
honest with you and tell you why I think you're straight--although you
must admit the evidence is rather against you.
"I happened to be right close when you drove down in here and stopped.
As a matter of fact, I was behind that little clump of junipers. Had
you driven around them instead of stopping this side, you couldn't have
failed to see me.
"You came down here mad at the trick that had been played you. You were
so mad, you started talking to yourself as a safety valve--blowing off
mental steam. You've spent a lot of time in the desert--alone. Men
like that frequently talk aloud their thoughts, just to hear a human
voice. You made matters pretty plain to me before you knew there was
any one within miles of you. For instance, you're not at all sure this
car you've got wasn't stolen. You're inclined to think it was. You're
broke--robbed, I take it, by the men who somehow managed to leave you
with the car and a load of booze on your hands. The trick must have
been turned this morning; down at the railroad, I imagine--because you
hadn't taken time to stop and size up the predicament you were in until
you got here.
"Your main idea was to get off somewhere out of sight. You were
scared. You didn't hear me behind you until I spoke--which proves
you're a green hand at dodging. And that, Ryan, is a very good
recommendation to a man in my line of work. But you're shrewd, and
you're game--dead game. You're a peach at thinking up schemes to get
yourself out of a hole. Of course, being new at it, you don't think
quite far enough. For instance, because you found me afoot it never
occurred to you that I might know something about a car; but the rest
of your plan was a dandy.
"Your idea of backing down there around the turn and burying the booze
was all right. With almost any other man it would have worked. Once
you got that hootch off your mind, I rather think you'd have been glad
to have me along with you, instead of giving me broad hints to leave.
But you haven't got the booze buried yet, and you've been figuring all
the evening. You don't see how the devil you're going to manage it
with me around.
"I'll do a little more guessing, now: I guess you've doped it out that
you'll pack the bedroll up here, tuck me in and pray to the Lord I'll
sleep sound. You're hoping you can cache the booze and make your
getaway while I've gone bye-low. Or possibly, if you got the booze put
away safe from my prying eyes, you might come back to bed and I'd find
you here in the morning just as if nothing had happened. How Is that
for guesswork?"
"You go tahell!" growled Casey, swallowing a sickly grin. He pressed
down the tobacco in his pipe, eyeing Nolan queerly. "If them damn'
lizards had uh let yuh alone, I wouldn't have nothin' on m' mind now
but my hat." He looked across the fire and grinned again.
"Keep on; you'll be tellin' me what the missus an' I was arguin' about
last night over long-distance. I've heard tell uh this four-bit mind
reading an' forecastin' your horrorscope fer a dime; but I never met up
with it before. If you're aimin' to take up a collection after the
show, you'll fare slim. I've been what a feller called 'dusted off'."
He added, after a pause that was eloquent, "They done it thorough!"
Mack Nolan laughed. "They usually are thorough, when they're 'dusting
off a chump', as I believe they call it."
Casey grunted. "'Chump' is right, mebby. But anyways, you're too
late, Mr. Nolan. I'm cleaned."
Mack Nolan rolled another cigarette, lighted it and flipped the match
into the campfire. He smoked it down to the last inch, staring into
the fire and saying nothing the while. When the cigarette stub
followed the match, he leaned back upon one elbow and began tracing a
geometrical figure in the sand with a stick.
"Ryan," he said abruptly, "you're square and I know it. The very
nature of my business makes me cautious about trusting men--but I'm
going to trust you." He stopped again, taking great pains with the
point of a triangle he was drawing.
Casey knocked the ashes out of his pipe against a rock. "Puttin' it
that way, Mr. Nolan, the man's yet to live that Casey Ryan ever
double-crossed. Cops I got no use for; nor yet bootleggers. Whether I
got any use for you, Mr. Nolan, I can say better when I've heard yuh
out. A goat I've been for the last time. But I'm willin' to HEAR yuh
out--and that there's more'n what I'd uh said this morning."
"And that's fair enough, Ryan. If you jumped into things with your
eyes shut, I don't think I'd want you with me."
Casey squirmed, remembering certain times when he had gone too headlong
into things.
"I'm going to ask you, Ryan, to tell me the whole story of this car and
its load of whisky. Before you do that, I'll tell you this much to
show good faith and prove to you how much I trust you: I'm an officer,
and my special work right now is to clean up a gang of bootleggers and
the crooked officers who are protecting them. What I know about your
case leads me to believe that you've run afoul of them and that you're
the man I've been looking for that can help me set a trap for them.
Would you like to do that?"
"If it's that bunch you're after, Mr. Nolan, I'd ruther land 'em in
jail than to find a ledge of solid gold ten feet thick an' a mile long.
One thing I'd like to know first. Are yuh or ain't yuh huntin' mules?"
Mack Nolan laughed. "I am, yes. But the mule I'm hunting is white!"
Casey studied that until he had the fresh pipeful of tobacco going
well. Then he looked up and grinned understandingly.
"So it's White Mule you're trailin'." He kicked a stub of greasewood
branch back into the flames and laughed. "Well, the tracks is deep an'
plenty, and if that's the trail you're takin', I'm with yuh. You ain't
a cop--leastways you don't spread your arms every time you turn around.
Gosh, I hate them wing-floppin' kind! They's one thing an' one only
that I hate worse--an' that's bootleggers an' moonshiners. If you got
a scheme to give them cusses their needin's, you can ask anybody if
Casey Ryan ain't the feller you can bank on."
"Yes. That's what I've been thinking. Now, I wish you'd tell me
exactly what you've been up against. Don't leave out anything, however
trivial it might seem to you."
Wherefore, Casey sat with the firelight flickering across his seamed,
Irish face and told the story of his wrongs. Trivial details Nolan had
asked for--and he got them with the full Casey Ryan flavor. Even the
old woman who rocked, Casey pictured--from his particular angle. Mack
Nolan sat up and listened, his eyes steady and his mouth, that had
curved to laughter many times during the recital, once more firm and
somewhat pitiless when Casey finished.
"This Smiling Lou; you'd know him again, of course?"
"Know him! Say, I'd know him after he'd fried a week in hell!" Casey's
tone left no doubt of his meaning.
"And I suppose you could tell this man Kenner a mile off and around a
corner. Now, I'll tell you what I want you to do, Casey. This may jar
you a little--until I explain. I want you--" Mack Nolan paused, his
lips twitching in a faint smile--"to do a little bootlegging yourself."
"Yuh--WHAT?" In the firelight Casey's eyes were seen to bulge.
"I want you to bootleg this whisky you've got in the car." Nolan's eyes
twinkled. "I want you to go back and peddle this booze, and I want you
to do it so that Smiling Lou or one of his bunch will hold you up and
highjack you. Do you see what I mean? You don't--so I'll tell you.
We'll put it in marked bottles. I have the bottles and the seals and
labels for every brand of liquor to be had in the country to-day. With
marked money and marked bottles, we ought to be able to get the goods
on that gang."
Casey thought of something quite suddenly and held out an imperative,
pointing finger.
"There's something else that feller told me was in the car!" he cried
agitatedly. "He said he had forty pints of French champagne cached in
a false bottom under the front seat. And he said the front cushion had
a blind pocket around the edges that was full uh dope. Hop, he called
it."
Mack Nolan whistled under his breath.
"And he turned the whole outfit over to you for sixteen hundred dollars
or so?" He stared thoughtfully into the fire. Abruptly he looked at
Casey.
"What the deuce had you done to him, Ryan?" he asked, with a quizzical
intentness. "He must have been scared stiff, to let go of all that
stuff for sixteen hundred. Why, man, the 'junk'--that's dope--alone
must be worth more than that. And the champagne--forty pints, you say?
He ought to get twenty dollars a pint for that. Figure it yourself. I
hope," he added seriously, "the fellow wasn't too scared to show up
again."
"Well," Casey said grimly, "I dunno how scart he is--but he knows darn'
well I'll kill 'im. I told im I would."
Again Mack Nolan laughed. "Catching's much better than killing, Ryan.
It hurts a man worse, and it lasts a heap longer. What do you say to
turning in? To-morrow we'll have a full day at my private bottling
works."
They moved their cooking outfit down near the Ford for safety's sake.
While it was wholly improbable that the car would be robbed in the
night, Mack Nolan was a man who took as few chances as possible. It
happened that the excavation Casey had so hopefully made that morning
formed a convenient level for their bed; wherefore they spread it
there, talking in low tones of their plans until they went to sleep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dawn was just thinning the curtain of darkness when Nolan woke Casey
with a shake of the shoulder.
"I think we'd better be moving from here before the world's astir. You
can back on down this draw, Ryan, and strike an old trail that cuts
over the ridge and up the next gulch to an old, deserted mine where
I've made headquarters. It isn't far, and we can have breakfast at my
camp."
Casey swallowed his astonishment, and for once in his life he did as he
was told without argument.
Mack Nolan's camp was fairly accessible by roundabout trail with a few
tire tracks to point the way for Casey. Straight across the ridges, it
would not have been more than two miles to Juniper Wells. Nevertheless
not one man in a year would be tempted to come this way, unless it were
definitely known that some one lived here.
As the camp of a man who was prospecting for pastime rather than for a
grubstake, the place was perfect. Mack Nolan had taken possession of a
cabin dug into the hill at the head of a long draw. A brush-covered
shed of makeshift construction sheltered a car of the ubiquitous Ford
make. Fifty yards away and in full sight of the cabin, the mouth of a
tunnel yawned blackly under a rhyolite ledge.
Casey swept the camp with an observant glance and nodded approval as
and stopped before the cabin.
"As a prospector, Mr. Nolan, I'll say 'tis a fine layout you got here.
An' tain't the first time an honest-lookin' mine has been made to cover
things far off from minin'. Like the Black Butte bunch, f'r instance.
But if any one was to ride up on yuh unexpected here, I'll say yuh
could meet 'em with a grin an' feel easy about your secrets."
"That's praise indeed, coming from an old hand like you," Nolan
declared. "Now I'll tell you something else. With Casey Ryan in the
camp the whole thing's twice as convincing. Come in. I want to show
you what I call an artistic interior."
Grinning, Casey followed him inside and exclaimed profanely in
admiration of Mack Nolan's genius. The cabin showed every mark of the
owner's interest in the geologic formation of that immediate district.
On the floor along the wall lay specimens of mineralized rock, a couple
of prospector's picks, a single-jack and a set of drills; a sample
sack, grimed and with a hole in the corner mended by the simple process
of gathering the cloth together around it and tying it tightly with a
string, hung from a nail above the tools. On the window sill were
specimens of ore; two or three of the pieces showed a richness that
lighted Casey's eyes with the enthusiasm of an old prospector. Mining
journals and a prospector's manual lay upon a box table at the foot of
the bunk. For the rest, the cabin looked exactly what it was--the
orderly home of a man quite accustomed to primitive living far off from
his fellows.
They had a very satisfactory breakfast cooked by Mack Nolan from his
own supplies and eaten in a leisurely manner while Nolan talked of
primary formations and secondary, and of mineral intrusions and breaks.
Casey listened and learned a few things he had not known, for all his
years of prospecting. Mack Nolan, he decided, could pass anywhere as a
mining expert.
"And now," said Nolan briskly, when he had hung up the dishpan and
draped the dishcloth over it to dry, "I'll show you the bottling works.
We'll have to do the work by lantern-light. There's not one chance in
fifty that any one would show up here--but you never can tell. We could
get the stuff out of sight easily enough while the car was coming up
the gulch. But the smell is a different matter. We'll take no chances."
At the head of the bunk, a curtained space beneath a high shelf very
obviously did duty as a wardrobe. A leather motor coat hung there, one
sleeve protruding beyond the curtain of flowered calico. Other garments
bulged the cloth here and there. Nolan, smiling over his shoulder at
Casey, nodded and pushed the clothing aside. A door behind opened
inward, admitting the two into a small recess from which another door
opened into a cellar dug deep into the hill.
Undoubtedly this had once been used as a frost-proof storeroom. A small
ventilator pipe opened--so Nolan told Casey--in the middle of a
greasewood clump. Nolan lighted a gasoline lantern that shed a white
brilliance upon the room. On the long table which extended down one
side of the room, Casey saw boxes of bottles and other supplies which
he did not at the moment recognize.
"We'll have to rebottle all the whisky," said Nolan.
"You'll see a certain mark blown into the bottom of each one of these.
The champagne, I'm afraid, I must either confiscate and destroy or run
the risk of marking the labels. The hop we'll lay aside for further
consideration."
Casey grinned, thinking of the speedy downfall of his enemies, Smiling
Lou and Kenner--and, as a secondary consideration other crooks of their
type.
"So now we'll unload the stuff, Ryan, and get to work here." Nolan
adjusted the white flame in the mantle of the gasoline lantern and led
the way outside. "Take in the seat-cushion, Casey. I don't fancy
opening it outside, even in this howling wilderness."
"I think I'll just pack in the kegs first, Mr. Nolan." For the first
time since the shock of Mr. Nolan's "mind-reading" the night before,
Casey ventured a suggestion. "Anybody comes along, it's the kegs
they'd look at cross-eyed. Cushions is expected in Fords--if I ain't
buttin' in," he added meekly.
"Which you're not. You're acting as my agent now, Ryan, and it will
take two heads to put this over without a hitch. Sure, put the kegs
out of sight first. The bottles next--and then we'll make short work
of the dope in the cushion."
Casey carried in the kegs while Nolan kept watch for inopportune
visitors. It was thought inadvisable to unload the camp outfit from
the car until the whisky was all removed. The outfit effectually hid
what was below--and they were taking no chances. They both breathed
freer when the two kegs were in the cellar. Nolan was pleased; too,
when Casey came out with the sample bag and announced that he would
carry the bottles in the bag. Then Nolan fancied he heard a car, and
walked away to where he would have a longer view down the gulch. He
would whistle, he said, and warn Casey if someone was coming.
He had not proceeded fifty yards when Casey yelled and brought him back
at a run. Casey was rummaging in the car, throwing things about with a
recklessness which ill-became an agent of the self-possessed Mack Nolan.
"There ain't a damn' bottle here!" he bellowed indignantly. "Them
crooks gypped me outa ten gallons uh good, bottle whisky! Now what do
you know about that, Mr. Nolan? That feller said it was high-grade
stuff he had packed away at the bottom. He lied. There ain't nothin'
here but a set uh skid chains an' a jack. An' the champagne, mebby,
under the front seat!"
Mack Nolan's eyes narrowed. "I think Ryan, I'll have a look under that
front seat."
He had a look--several looks, in fact. There was the false bottom
under the seat, but there was nothing in it. He took his pocket knife,
opened a blade and split the edge of the seat-cushion at the bottom. He
inserted a finger and thumb and drew out a bit of hair stuffing. He
stood up and eyed Casey sharply, and Casey stared back defensively.
"He was a darned liar from start t' finish. He said there was
champagne an' he said there was hop," Casey stated flatly.
"I wondered at his letting go of stuff as valuable as that," said
Nolan. "I think we'd better take a look at those kegs."
They went into the cellar and took a look at the kegs. Both kegs.
Afterward they stood and looked at each other. Casey's hands went to
his hips, and the muscles along his jaw hardened into lumps. He spat
into the dirt of the cellar floor.
"Water!" He snorted disgustedly. "Casey Ryan with the devil an' all
scart outa him, thinkin' he had ownership of a load uh booze an' hop
sufficient t' hang 'im!" His hand slid into his trousers pocket,
reaching for the comforting plug of tobacco. "Stuck up an' robbed is
what happens t' Casey. You can ask anybody if it ain't highway
robbery!"
Nolan stopped whistling under his breath. "There's the Ford," he
reminded Casey comfortingly.
"Which I wisht it wasn't!" snarled Casey. "You know yourself, Mr.
Nolan, it's likely stole, an' the first man I meet in the trail'll
likely take it off me, claimin' it's his'n!"
Mack Nolan started whistling again, but checked himself abruptly.
"Well, our trap's wanting bait, I see. This leaves me still hunting
the White Mule."
"Aw, tahell with your White Mule! Tahell with everything!" Casey
kicked the nearest keg viciously and went out into the sunshine,
swearing to himself.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the shade of a juniper that grew on the highest point of the gulch's
rim, Mack Nolan lay sprawled on the flat of his back, one arm for a
pillow, and stared up into the serene blue of the sky with cottony
flakes of cloud swimming steadily to the northeast. Three feet away,
Casey Ryan rested on left hip and elbow and stared glumly down upon the
cabin directly beneath them. Whenever his pale, straight-lidded eyes
focussed upon the dusty top of the Ford car standing in front of the
cabin, Casey said something under his breath. Miles away to the
south, pale violet, dreamlike in the distance, the jagged outline of a
small mountain range stood as if painted upon the horizon. A wavy
ribbon of smudgy brown was drawn uncertainly across the base of the
mountains. This, Casey knew, when his eyes lifted to look that way,
marked the line of the Sante Fe and a train moving heavily upgrade to
the west.
Toward it dipped the smooth stretch of barren mesa cut straight down
the middle with a yellow line that was the highway up which Casey had
driven the morning before. The inimitable magic of distance and high
desert air veiled greasewood, sage and sand with the glamour of
unreality. The mountains beyond, unspeakably desolate and forbidding
at close range, and the little black buttes standing afar, off--small
spewings of age-old volcanos dead before man was born--seemed
fascinating, unknown islets anchored in a sea of enchantment. Across
the valley to the west nearer mountains, all amethyst and opal tinted,
stood bold and inscrutable, with jagged peaks thrust into the blue to
pierce and hold the little clouds that came floating by. Even the
gulch at hand had been touched by the enchanter's wand and smiled
mysteriously in the vivid sunlight, the very air a-quiver with that
indescribable beauty of the high mesa land which holds desert dwellers
in thrall.
When first Casey saw the smoke smudge against the mountains to the
south, he remembered his misadventure of the lower desert and swore.
When he looked again, the majestic sweep of distance gave him a
satisfied feeling of freedom from the crowded pettinesses of the city.
For the first time since trouble met him in the trail between
Victorville and Barstow, Casey heaved a sigh of content because he was
once more out in the big land he loved. Those distant, painted
mountains, looking as impossible as the back drop of a stage, held
gulches and deep canyons he knew. The closer hills he had prospected.
The mesa, spread all around him, seemed more familiar than the white
apartment house in Los Angeles which Casey had lately called home. And
if the thought of the Little Woman brought with it the vague discomfort
of a schoolboy playing hookey, Casey could not have regretted being
here with Mack Nolan if he had tried.
They were lying up here in the shade--following the instinct of other
creatures of the wild to guard against surprises--while they worked out
a nice problem in moonshine. And since the desert had never meant a
monotonously placid life to Casey--who carried his problems
philosophically as a dog bears patiently with fleas--he had every
reason now for feeling very much at home. When he reached mechanically
into his pocket for his Bull Durham and papers, any man who knew him
well would have recognized the motion as a sign that Casey was himself
again, once more on his mental feet and ready to go boring
optimistically into his next bunch of trouble.
Mack Nolan raised his head off his arm and glanced at Casey quizzically.
"Well--we can't catch fish if we won't cut bait," he volunteered
sententiously. "I've a nice little job staked out for you, Casey."
Casey gave a grunt that might mean one of several things, and which
probably meant them all. He waited until he had his cigarette going.
"If it ain't a goat's job I'm fer it," he said. "Casey Ryan ain't the
man t' set in the shade whilst there's men runnin' loose he's darned
anxious t' meet."
"I've been thinking over the deal those fellows pulled on you. If the
man Kenner had left you the booze and dope he told you was in the car,
I'd say it was a straight case of a sticky-fingered officer letting a
bootlegger by with part of his load, and a later attack of cold feet on
the part of the bootlegger. But they didn't leave you any booze. So I
have doped it this way, Ryan.
"The thing's deeper than it looked, yesterday. Those two were working
together, part of a gang, I should say, with a fairly well-organized
system. By accident--and probably for a greater degree of safety in
getting out of the city, Kenner invited you to ride with him. He
wanted no argument with that traffic cop--no record made of his name
and license number. So he took you in. When he found out who you were,
he knew you were at outs with the law. He knew you as an experienced
desert man. He had you placed as a valuable member of their gang, if
you could be won over and persuaded to join them.
"As soon as possible he got you behind the wheel--further protection to
himself if he should meet an officer who was straight. He felt you out
on the subject of a partnership. And when you met Smiling Lou--well,
this Kenner had decided to take no chance with you. He still had hopes
of pulling you in with them, but he was far from feeling sure of you.
He undoubtedly gave Smiling Lou the cue to make the thing appear an
ordinary case of highjacking while he ditched his whole load so that
there would be no evidence against him if he lost out and you turned
nasty.
"I'm absolutely certain, Casey, that if you had not been along, Smiling
Lou would not have touched that load. They'd probably have stopped
there for a talk, exchanged news and perhaps perfected future plans,
and parted like two old cronies. It's possible, of course, that
Smiling Lou might have taken some whisky back with him--if he had
needed it. Otherwise, I think they split more cash than booze, as a
rule."
Casey sat up. "Well, they coulda played me for a sucker easy enough,"
he admitted reluctantly. "An' if it'll be any help to yuh, Mr. Nolan,
I'll say that I never seen the money passed from Kenner to Smilin' Lou,
an' I never seen a bottle unloaded from the car. I heard 'em yes. An'
I'll say there was a bunch of 'em all right. But what I SEEN was the
road ahead of me and that car of Smilin' Lou's standin' in the middle
of it. He had a gun pulled on me, mind yuh--and you can ask anybody if
a feller feels like rubberin' much when there's only the click of a
trigger between him an' a six-foot hole in the ground."
"All the more reason," said Nolan, also sitting up with his hands
clasped around his knees, "why it's important to catch them with the
goods. You'll have to peddle hootch, Casey, until we get Smiling Lou
and his outfit."
"And where, Mr. Nolan, do I git the booze to peddle?" asked Casey
practically.
Nolan laughed to himself. "It can be bought," he said, "but I'd rather
not. Since you've never monkeyed with the stuff, it might make you
conspicuous if you went around buying up a load of hootch. And of
course I can't appear in this thing at all. But I have what I think is
a very good plan."
Casey looked at him inquiringly, and again Nolan laughed.
"Nothing for it, Casey,--we'll have to locate a still and rob it. That,
or make some of our own, which takes time. And it's an unpleasant,
messy job anyway."
Casey stared dubiously down into the gulch. "That'd be fine, Mr.
Nolan, if we knew where was the still. Or mebby yuh do know."
Mack Nolan shook his head. "No, I don't, worse luck. I haven't been
long enough in the district to know as much about it as I hope to know
later on. Prospecting for this headquarters took a little time; and
getting my stuff moved in here secretly took more time. A week ago,
Casey, I shouldn't have been quite ready to use you. But you came when
you were needed, and so--I feel sure the White Mule will presently show
up."
Casey lifted his head and stared meditatively out across the immensity
of the empty land around them.
"She's a damn' big country, Mr. Nolan. I dunno," he remarked
doubtfully. "But Casey Ryan has yet t' go after a thing an' fail t'
git it. I guess if it's hootch we want, it ought t' be easy enough t'
find; it shore has been hard t' dodge it lately! If yuh want White
Mule, Mr. Nolan, you send Casey out travelin' peaceful an' meanin' harm
t' nobody. Foller Casey and you'll find 'im tangled up with a mess uh
hootch b'fore he gits ten miles from camp."
"You could go out and highjack some one." Nolan agreed, taking him
seriously--which Casey had not intended. "I think we'll go down and
load the camp outfit into my car, Ryan, and I'll start you out. Go up
into your old stamping ground where people know you. If you're careful
in picking your men, you could locate some hootch, couldn't you,
without attracting attention?"
Casey studied the matter. "Bill Masters could mebby help me out," he
said finally. "Only I don't like the friends Bill's been wishin' onto
me lately. This man Kenner, that held me up, knowed Bill Masters
intimate. I'm kinda losin' my taste fer Bill lately."
Mack Nolan seized upon the clue avidly. Before Casey quite realized
what he had done, he found himself hustled away from camp in Mack
Nolan's car, headed for Lund in the service of his government. Since
young Kenner had been able to talk so intimately of Bill Masters, Mack
Nolan argued that Bill Masters should likewise be able to give some
useful information concerning young Kenner. Moreover, a man in Bill
Masters' position would probably know at least a few of the hidden
trails of the White Mule near Lund.
"If you can bring back a load of moonshine Ryan, by all means do so,"
Nolan instructed Casey at the last moment. "Here's money to buy it
with. We should have enough to make a good haul for Smiling Lou.
Twenty gallons at least--forty, if you can get them. Keep your weather
eye open, and whatever happens, don't mention my name or say that you
are working with the law. In five days, if you are not here, I shall
drive to Las Vegas. Get word to me there if anything goes wrong. Just
write or wire to General Delivery. But I look for you back, Ryan, not
later than Friday midnight. Take no unnecessary risk; this is more
important than you know."
Nolan's crisp tone of authority remained with Casey mile upon mile. And
such was the Casey Ryan driving that midnight found him coasting into
Bill Masters' garage in Lund with the motor shut off and a grin on the
Casey Ryan face.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mack Nolan had just crawled into his bunk on Wednesday night when he
thought he heard a car laboring up the gulch. He sat up in bed to
listen and then got hurriedly into his clothes. He was standing just
around the corner of the dugout where the headlights could not reach
him, when Casey killed the engine and stopped before the door. Steam
was rising in a small cloud from the radiator cap, and the sound of
boiling water was distinctly audible some distance away.
Mack Nolan waited until Casey had climbed out from behind the wheel and
headed for the door. Then he stepped out and hailed him. Casey
started perceptibly, whirling as if to face an enemy. When he saw that
it was Nolan he apparently lost his desire to enter the cabin. Instead
he came close to Nolan and spoke in a hoarse whisper.
"We better run 'er under the shed, Mr. Nolan, and drain the darned
radiator. I dunno am I follered or not, but I was awhile back. But the
man that catches Casey Ryan when he's on the trail an' travelin, has
yet t' be born. An' you can ask anybody if that ain't so."
Mack Nolan's eyes narrowed. "And who followed you then?" he asked
quietly. "Did you bring any hootch?"
"Did yuh send Casey Ryan after hootch, or was it mebby spuds er
somethin'?" Casey retorted with heavy dignity. "Will yuh pack it in,
Mr. Nolan, whilst I back the car in the shed, or shall I bring it when
I come? It ain't so much," he added drily, "but it cost the trouble
of a trainload."
"I'll take it in," said Nolan. "If any one does come we want no
evidence in reach."
Casey turned to the car, clawed at his camp outfit and lifted out a
demijohn which he grimly handed to Nolan. "Fer many a mile it rode on
the seat with me so I could drink 'er down if they got me cornered," he
grinned. "One good swaller is about the size of it, Mr. Nolan."
Nolan grinned in sympathy and turned into the cabin, bearing the
three-gallon, wicker-covered glass bottle in his arms. Presently he
returned to the doorway and stood there listening down the gulch until
Casey came up, walking from the shed.
"'Tis a good thing yuh left this other car standin' here cold an'
peaceful, Mr. Nolan," Casey, observed, after he also had stood for a
minute listening. "If they're follerin' they'll be here darn' soon. If
they ain't I've ditched 'em. Let's git t' bed an' I'll tell yuh my
tale uh woe."
Without a word Nolan led the way into the cabin. In the dark they
undressed and got into the bed which was luckily wide enough for two.
"Had your supper?" Nolan asked belatedly when they were settled.
"I did not," Casey grunted. "I will say, Mr. Nolan, there's few times
in my life when you'd see Casey Ryan missin' 'is supper whilst layin'
tracks away from a fight. But if it was light enough you could gaze
upon 'im now. And I must hand it t' the Gallopin' Gussie yuh give me
the loan of fer the trip. She brung me home ahead of the sheriff--and
you can ask anybody if Casey Ryan himself can't be proud uh that!"
"The sheriff?" Nolan's voice was puzzled. He seemed to be considering
something for a minute, before he spoke again. "You could have
explained to the sheriff, couldn't you, your reason for having booze in
the car?"
Casey raised to one elbow. "When yuh told Casey Ryan 'twas not many
men you'd trust, and that you trusted me an' the business was t' be
secret--Mr. Nolan, you 'was talkin' t' CASEY RYAN!" He lay down again
as if that precluded further argument.
"Good! I thought I hadn't made a mistake in my man," Nolan approved, in
a tone that gave Casey an inner glow of pride in himself. "Let's have
the story, old man. Did you see Bill Masters?"
"Bill Masters," said Casey grimly, "was not in Lund. His garage is
sold an' Bill's in Denver--which is a long drive for a Ford t' git
there an' back before Friday midnight. Yuh put a time limit me, Mr.
Nolan, an' nobody had Bill's address. I didn't foller Bill t' Denver.
I asked some others in Lund if they knowed a man named Kenner, and they
did not. So then I went huntin' booze that I could git without the
hull of Nevada knowin' it in fifteen minutes. An' Casey's got this t'
say: When yuh WANT hootch, it's hard t' find as free gold in granite.
When yuh DON'T want it, it's forced on yuh at the point of a gun. This
jug I stole--seein' your business is private, Mr. Nolan.
"I grabbed it off some fellers I knowed in Lund an' never had no use
for, anyway. They're mean enough when they're sober, an' when they're
jagged they're not t' be mentioned on a Sunday. I mighta paid 'em for
it, but money's no good t' them fellers an' there's no call t' waste
it. So they made a holler and I sets the jug down an' licks them both,
an' comes along home mindin' my own business.
"So I guess they 'phoned the sheriff in Vegas that here comes a
bootlegger and land 'im quick. Anyway, I was goin' t' stop there an'
take on a beefsteak an' a few cups uh coffee, but I never done it. I
was slowin' down in front uh Sam's Place when a friend uh mine gives me
the high sign t' put 'er in high an' keep 'er goin'. Which I done.
"Down by Ladd's, Casey looks back an' here comes the sheriff's car hell
bent fer 'lection (anyway it looked like the sheriff's car). An' I
wanta say right here, Mr. Nolan, that's a darn' good Ford yuh got! I
was follered, and 'I was follered hard. But I'm here an' they'
ain't--an' you can ask anybody if that didn't take some going'!"
In the darkness of the cabin Casey turned over and heaved a great sigh.
On the heels of that came a chuckle.
"I got t' hand it t' the L. A. traffic cops, Mr. Nolan. They shore
learned me a lot about dodgin'. So now yuh got the hull story. If it
was the sheriff behind me an' if he trails me here, they got no
evidence an' you can mebby square it with 'im. You'd know what t' tell
'im--which is more'n what Casey Ryan can say."
Casey fell asleep immediately afterward, but Mack Nolan lay for a long
while with his eyes wide open and his ears alert for strange sounds in
the gulch. He was a new man in this district, working independently of
sheriff's offices. Casey Ryan was the first man he had confided in;
all others were fair game for Nolan to prove honest or dishonest with
the government. The very nature of his business made it so. For when
whisky runners drove openly in broad daylight through the country with
their unlawful loads, somewhere along the line officers of the law were
sharing the profits. Nolan knew none of them,--by sight. If he carried
the records of some safely memorized and pigeonholed for future use,
that was his own business. Mack Nolan's thoughts were his own and he
guarded them jealously and slept with his lips tightly closed. He
wanted no sheriff coming to him for explanation of his movements.
Wherefore he listened long, and when he slept his slumber was light.
At daylight he was up and abroad. Two hours after sunrise Casey awoke
with the smell of breakfast in his nostrils. He rolled over and
blinked at Mack Nolan standing with his hat on the back of his head and
a cigarette between his lips, calmly turning three hot-cakes with a
kitchen knife. Casey grinned condescendingly. He himself turned his
cakes by the simple process of tossing them in the air a certain kind
of flip, and catching them dexterously as they came down. Right there
he decided that Mack Nolan was not after all a real outdoors man.
"Well, the sheriff didn't arrive last night," Nolan observed
cheerfully, when he saw that Casey was awake. "I don't much look for
him, either. Your driving on past the turn to Juniper Wells and coming
up that other old road very likely threw him off the track. You must
have been close to the State line then and he gave you up as a bad job."
"It was a GOOD job!" Casey maintained reaching for his clothes. "I
made 'em think I was headed clean outa the country. If they knowed who
it was at all, they'd know I belong in L. A., and I figured they'd
guess I was headed there. They stopped for something this side of
Searchlight an' so I pulls away from 'em a couple of miles. They never
seen where I went to."
While he washed for breakfast, Casey began to take stock of certain
minor injuries.
"That darned Pete Gibson has got tushes in his mouth like a wild hawg;
the kind that sticks out," he grumbled, touching certain skinned places
on his knuckles. "Every time I landed on 'im yesterday I run against
them tushes uh his'n." But he added with a grin, "They ain't so solid
as they was when I met up with 'im. I felt one of 'em give 'fore I got
through."
"Brings the price of moonshine up a bit, doesn't it?" Nolan suggested
drily. "I rather think you might better have paid the men their price.
A fight is well enough in its way--I'm Irish myself. But as my agent,
Ryan, the main idea is to let the law fight for you. Our work is
merely to give the law a chance. I like your not wanting to explain to
the sheriff. Prohibition officers do not explain, as a rule. The law
behind them does that.
"And since the price seems to be rather hard on the knuckles--" He
glanced down at Casey's hands and grinned. "--I think it may come
cheaper to make the stuff ourselves. Licking two men for three
gallons, and getting the officers at your tail light into the bargain,
is all right as an experiment; but I don't believe, Ryan, we ought to
adopt that as a habit."
Casey cocked an eye up at him. "Did yuh ever make White Mule, Mr.
Nolan?" he asked grimly.
Nolan laughed his easy little chuckle. "Why, no, Ryan, I never did. Did
you?"
"Naw. I seen some made once, but I had too much of it inside me at the
time to learn the receipt for it. I'd rather steal it, if it's all the
same to you, Mr. Nolan." His hand went up to the back of his head and
moved forward, although there was no hat to push. "I've lived honest
all these years--an', dammit, it's kinda tough to break out with
stealin I what yuh don't want! Couldn't we fill them bottles with
somethin' that LOOKS like hootch? Cold tea should get by, Mr. Nolan.
It'd be a fine joke on Smilin' Lou."
"A good joke, maybe--but no evidence. It isn't against the law, Ryan,
to have cold tea in your possession. No, it's got to be whisky, and
there's got to be a load of it. Enough to look like business and tempt
him or any other member of the gang you happen to meet. If they caught
you with three gallons, Casey, they'd probably run you in and feel very
virtuous about it. Nothing for it, I'm afraid. We'll have to become
real moonshiners ourselves for awhile."
Casey ate with less appetite after that. Making moonshine did not
appeal to him at all. Given his choice, I think he would even prefer
drinking it, unhappy as the effect had been on him.
"We'll need a still, and we'll need the stuff. I'm going to leave you
in charge of the camp, Ryan, while I make a trip to Needles. I'll
deputize you to assist me in cleaning up this district. And this
district, Ryan, touches salt water. So if revenge looks good to you,
you'll have a fine chance to get even with the bootleggers. And in the
meantime, just kill time around camp here while I'm gone. If any one
shows up, you're prospecting."
That day, doubt-devils took hold of Casey Ryan and plucked at his
belief. How did he know that Mack Nolan wasn't another bootlegger,
wanting to rope Casey in on a job for some fell purpose of his own? He
had Mack Nolan's word and nothing more. For that matter, he had also
had young Kenner's word. Kenner had fooled him completely. Mack Nolan
could also fool him--perhaps.
"Well, anyhow, he never claimed to know Bill Masters, and that's a
point in 'is favor. And if it's some dirty work he's up to, he coulda
made it shorter than what he's doin'. An' if he's double-crossin'
Casey Ryan--well, anyway, Casey Ryan 'll be present at the time an'
place when he does it!"
Upon that comforting thought, Casey decided to trust Mack Nolan until
he caught him playing crooked; and proceeded to kill time as best he
could.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was noon the next day when Nolan returned, and he did not explain
why he was eighteen hours overdue. Casey eyed him expectantly, but
Nolan's manner was brisk and preoccupied.
"Help me unload this stuff, Ryan," he said, "and put it out of sight in
the cellar. We won't have to go through the process of making
moonshine, after all."
Casey looked into the car, pulling aside the tarp. Four kegs he
counted, and lifted out one.
"An' how many did YOU lick, Mr. Nolan?" he grinned over his shoulder as
he started for the door.
Nolan laughed noncommittally.
"Perhaps I'm luckier at picking my bootleggers," he retorted. "If you
carry the right brand of bluff, you can keep the skin on your knuckles,
Ryan. This beats making it, at any rate."
That afternoon and the next day, Casey Ryan did what he never dreamed
was possible. With Mack Nolan to show him how, Casey performed
miracles. While he did not, literally change water into wine, he did
give forty-three gallons of White Mule a most imposing pedigree.
He turned kegs of crude, moonshine whisky into Canadian Club, Garnkirk,
Tom Pepper, Three Star Hennessey and Cognac--if you were to believe the
bottles, labels and government seals. Under Mack Nolan's instruction
and with his expert assistance, the forgery was perfect. While the
cellar reeked with the odor of White Mule when they had finished, the
bottled array on the table whispered of sybaritic revelings to glisten
the eyes of the most dissipated man about town.
"When it's as easy done as that, Mr. Nolan, the feller's a fool that
drinks it. You've learnt Casey Ryan somethin' that mighta done 'im
some good a few years back." He picked up a flat, pint bottle and
caressed its label with reminiscent finger tips.
"Many's the time me an' old Tommy Pepper drove stage together," he
mused. "Throwed 'im at a bear once that I met in the trail over in
Colorado when I hadn't no gun on me. Busted a pint on his nose--man!
Then I never waited to see what happened. I was a wild divil them days
when me an' Tommy Pepper was side pardners. But a yaller snake with a
green head crawled out of a bottle of 'im once--and that there was
where Casey Ryan says good-by to booze. If I hadn't quit 'im then, I'd
sure as hell quit 'im now. After this performance, Mr. Nolan, Casey
Ryan's goin' to look twice into his coffee pot. I wouldn't believe in
cow's milk, if I done the milkin' myself!"
"Most of the stuff that's peddled nowadays is doctored," Nolan
replied, with the air of one who knows. "When it isn't White Mule,
it's likely to be something worse. That's one of the chief reasons why
I'm fighting it. If they only peddled decent whisky it wouldn't be so
bad, Ryan. But it's rank poison. I've seen so many go stone blind--or
die--that it makes me pretty savage sometimes. So now I'll coach you
in the part you're to play as hootch runner; and to-morrow you can
start for Los Angeles."
Casey did not answer. He felt absently for his pipe, filled and
lighted it and went out to sit on the doorstep in gloomy meditation
while he smoked.
Returning to Los Angeles, even without a bootlegger's load, was not a
matter which Casey liked to contemplate. He would have to face the
Little Woman if he went back; either as a deliberate liar, who lied to
his wife to gain the freedom he might have had without resorting to
deceit, or as the victim once more of crooks. Casey thought he would
prefer the accusation of lying deliberately to the Little Woman, though
it made him squirm to think of it. He wished she had not openly
taunted him with getting into trouble and needing her always to get him
out.
He would like to tell her that he was now working for the government.
The secrecy of his mission, the danger it involved, would impress even
her amused cynicism. But the very secrecy of his mission in itself
made it impossible for him to tell her anything about it. Casey would
not admit it, but it was a real disappointment to him that he could not
wear a star on his coat.
All that day and evening he was glum, a strange mood for Casey Ryan.
But if Mack Nolan noticed his silence, he gave no sign. Nolan himself
was wholly absorbed by the business in hand. The success of this plan
meant a good deal to him, and he told Casey so very frankly; which
lightened Casey's gloom perceptibly.
Casey was to drive to Los Angeles--even to San Diego if necessary--and
return within a week, unless Nolan's hopes were fulfilled and Casey was
held up and highjacked. If he were apprehended by officers who were
honestly discharging their duty, Casey was to do thus-and-so, and
presently be free to drive on with his load. If he were highjacked
(Casey gritted his teeth and said he hoped the highjacker would be
Smiling Lou), he was to permit himself to be robbed, worm himself as
far as possible into their confidence and return for further orders.
If Mack Nolan should chance to be absent from the cabin, then Casey was
to wait until he returned. And Nolan intimated that hereafter the
making of moonshine might be a part of Casey's duties. Then, without
warning, Mack Nolan struck at the heart of Casey's worry.
"I don't want to dictate to any man in family affairs, Ryan. But I've
got to speak of one other matter," he said diffidently. "I suppose
naturally you'll want to go home and let your wife know you're still
alive, anyway. But if you can manage to keep your present business a
secret for the time being, I think you'd better do it. You said you
were planning to be away on a trip for some time, I remember. If you
can just let it go that way, or say that you are prospecting over here,
I wish you would. Think you can manage that all right?"
"I'd rather manage a six-horse team of bronk mules," Casey admitted.
"But after the way the missus thinks I lied to 'er about takin' the
next train home from Barstow, anything I say 'll be used agin' me. My
wife's got brains. She ain't put it down that the trains have quit
runnin'. Accordin' to her figures, Casey's lied and he's in a hole
again, an' it'll be up to her an' Jack to run windlass an' pull 'im
out. Don't matter what I say she won't believe me anyhow--so Casey
won't say nothin'. Can't lie with your mouth shut, can yuh?"
"Oh, yes, it's been done," Mack Nolan chuckled. "Now we'll set down
the serial numbers and the bank name of this 'jack',--and here's your
expense money separate. And if there's anything that isn't clear to
you, Ryan, speak up. You won't hear from me again, probably, until
you're back from this fishing trip."
Casey thought that everything was perfectly clear, and rashly he said
so, as he started off.
From Barstow to Victorville, from Victorville to Camp Cajon Casey drove
expectantly, hoping to meet Smiling Lou. He scanned each car that
approached and slowed for every meeting like a searching party or a man
who is lost and wishes to inquire the way. His pace would have been
law-abiding in Los Angeles at five o'clock on Broadway between Fourth
and Eighth streets. Goggled women tourists eyed him curiously, and one
car stopped full to see what he wanted. But his "Tom Pepper" rode safe
under the tarp behind him, and the "Three Star Hennessey" beaded
daintily with the joggling it got, and Casey was neither halted nor
questioned as he passed.
At Camp Cajon Casey stopped and cooked an early supper, because the
summer crowd was there and a real bootlegger would have considered
stopping rather unsafe. Casey boiled coffee over one of the camp
fireplaces and watched furtively the sunburned holiday group nearest.
He placed his supper on one of the round, cement tables near the car,
and every man who passed that way Casey watched unblinkingly while he
ate.
He succeeded in making three different parties swallow their supper in
a hurry and pack up and leave, glancing back uneasily at Casey as they
drove away. But Casey himself was unmolested, and no one asked about
his load.
From Camp Cajon to San Bernardino Casey drove furiously, remembering
young Kenner's desire for speed. He stopped there for the night, and
nearly had a fight with the garage man where he put up, because he
showed undue caution concerning the safety of his car from prowlers
during the night.
He left the car there that day and returned furtively after dark,
asking the night man if he had seen any saps around his car. The night
man looked at him uncomprehendingly.
"I dunno--nothin's been picked up since I come on at six. We ain't
responsible for lost articles, anyway. See that sign?"
Casey grunted, cranked up and drove away, wondering whether the night
man was as innocent as he tried to act.
From San Bernardino to Los Angeles Casey drove placidly as a load of
oranges in February. He put up at a cheap place on San Pedro Street,
with his car in the garage next door and a five-dollar tip in the palm
of a rat-faced mechanic with Casey's injunction to clean 'er dingbats
and keep other people away.
He did not go out to see the Little Woman, after all. He had sent her
a wire from Goffs the day before, saying that he was prospecting with a
fellow and he hoped she was well. This, after long pondering, had
seemed to him the easiest way out of an argument with the Little Woman.
The wire had given no address whereby she might reach him, but the
omission was not the oversight Casey hoped she would consider it. He
wanted to be reassuring without starting anything.
Los Angeles with no Little Woman at his elbow was a dismal hole, and
Casey got out of it as soon as possible. As per instructions, he drove
down to San Diego, ventured perilously close to the Mexico line, fooled
around there for a day looking for trouble, failed to find so much as a
frown and drove back.
He headed straight for San Bernardino, which was Smiling Lou's
headquarters. He killed time there and met the sheriff on the street
the day he arrived. The sheriff had a memory trained to hold faces
indefinitely. He smiled a little, made a polite gesture in the general
direction of his hat and passed on. Casey swore to himself and
resolved to duck guiltily around the nearest corner if he saw the
sheriff coming his way again.
On the day when his time limit expired Casey drove up the gulch to
Nolan's camp. In the car behind him rode undisturbed his Canadian
Club, Garnkirk, Three-Star Hennessey, Cognac and Tom Pepper; bottles,
labels, government seals and all. Nolan was walking over from the
tunnel when Casey arrived. He smiled inquiringly as he shook hands,--a
ceremony to which Casey was plainly unaccustomed.
"What luck, Ryan? I beat you back by about two hours. Getting things
ready to begin making it. Did they catch you all right?"
"Naw!" Casey spat disgustedly. "Never seen a booze peddler, never seen
a cop look my way. I went around actin' like I just killed a man an'
stole a lady's diamonds, and the sheriff at San Berdoo TIPS 'IS HAT TO
ME, by golly! Drove through L. A. hella-whoopin' an' not a darned
traffic cop knowed it was Casey Ryan. You can ask anybody if I didn't
do every thing possible to git in bad or give bootleggers a tip I was
one of 'em.
"You can't git Casey Ryan up agin' the gang you're after, Mr. Nolan.
Only way Casey Ryan can git up agin' the law is to go along peaceable
tryin' to please the missus an' mindin' his own business. I coulda
peddled that damn' hootch on a hangin' tray like circus lemonade. I
coulda stood on the corner in any uh them damned towns with the hull
works piled out on a table in front of me, an' I coulda hollered my
damn' head off; an' Smilin' Lou woulda passed me by like I was sellin'
chewin' gum and shoe strings."
Mack Nolan looked at Casey, turned and went into the cabin, sat down on
the edge of the bed and laughed until the tears dripped over his
lashes. Casey Ryan followed him, and sat on the edge of the table with
his arms folded. Whenever Mack Nolan lifted his face from his palms
and looked at Casey, Casey swore. Whereat Mack Nolan would give
another whoop.
You can't wonder if relations were somewhat strained, between them for
the rest of that day.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Nature had made Casey Ryan an optimist. The blood of Ireland had made
him pugnacious. And Mack Nolan had a way with him. Wherefore, Casey
Ryan once more came larruping down the grade to Camp Cajon and turned
in there with a dogged purpose in his eyes and with his jaw set
stubbornly. History has it that whenever Casey Ryan gets that look in
his face, the man underneath might just as well holler and crawl out;
because holler he must, before Casey would ever let him up.
Behind him, stowed under the bedding, grub and camp dishes, rode his
eight cases of bootlegger's bait, packed convincingly in the sawdust,
straw and cardboard of the wet old days when Uncle Sam himself O. K.'d
the job. A chain of tiny beads at the top of each bottle lied and said
it was good liquor. The boxes themselves said, "This side up"--when
any side up would thrill the soul of the man who owned a wet appetite
and a dry throat.
It was a good job Mack Nolan had made of the bottling. Uncle Sam
himself must needs polish his spectacles and take another look to
detect the fraud. It was a marvelous job of bottling,--and the proof
lay only in the drinking. "Tommy" Pepper rode in pint flasks designed
to slip safely into a man's coat pocket. Beside him two cases of
Canadian Club (if you were satisfied with the evidence of your eyes)
sat serene in round-shouldered bottles--conventional, secure in its
reputation. Cognac and Garnkirk, a case for each, rode in tall, slim
bottles with no shoulders at all. Plumper than they, Three Star
Hennessey sat smugly waiting until the joke was turned upon its victim.
A tempting load it was, to men of certain minds and morals. Casey
grinned sardonically when he thought of it.
Casey drove deep into the grove of sycamores and made camp there, away
from the chattering picnic parties at the cement tables. By Mack
Nolan's advice he was adopting a slightly different policy. He no
longer shunned his fellow men or glared suspiciously when strangers
approached. Instead he was very nearly the old Casey Ryan, except that
he failed to state his name and business to all and sundry with the old
Casey Ryan candor, but instead avoided the subject altogether or evaded
questions with vague generalities.
But as an understudy for Ananias, Casey Ryan would have been a failure.
In two hours or less he had made easy trail acquaintance with six
different men, and he had unconsciously managed to vary his vague
account of himself six different times. Wherefore he was presently
asked cautiously concerning his thirst.
"They's times," said Casey, hopefully lowering an eyelid, "when a
feller dassent take a nip, no matter how thirsty he gits."
The questioner stared at him for a minute and slowly nodded. "You're
darn' right," he assented. "I scursely ever touch anything, myself."
And he added vaguely, "Quite a lot of it peddled out here in this camp,
I guess. Tourists comin' through are scared to pack it themselves--but
they sure don't overlook any chances to take a snort."
"Yeah?" Casey cocked a knowing eye at the speaker. "They must pay a
pretty fair price fer it, too. Don't the cops bother folks none?"
"Some--I guess."
Casey filled his pipe and offered his tobacco sack to the man. The
fellow took it, nodding listless thanks, and filled his own pipe. The
two sat down together on the knee of a deformed sycamore and smoked in
circumspect silence.
"Arizona, I see." The man nodded toward the license plates on Casey's
car.
"Uh-huh." Casey glanced that way. "Know a man name of Kenner?" He
asked abruptly.
The fellow looked at Casey sidelong, without turning his head.
"Some. Do you?"
"Some." Casey felt that he was making headway, though it was a good
deal like playing checkers with the king row wide open and only two
crowned heads to defend his men.
"Friend uh yours?" The fellow turned his head and looked straight at
Casey.
Casey returned him a pale, straight-lidded stare. The man's glance
flickered and swung away.
"Who wants to know?" Casey asked calmly.
"Oh, you can call me Jim Cassidy. I just asked." He removed his pipe
from his mouth and inspected it apathetically. "He's a friend of Bill
Masters, garage man up at Lund. Know Bill?"
"Any man says I don't, you can call 'im a liar." Casey also inspected
his pipe. "Bought that car off'n Kenner," Casey added boldly. Getting
into trouble, he discovered, carried almost the thrill of trying to
keep out of it.
"Yeah?" The self-styled Jim Cassidy looked at the Ford more
attentively. "And contents?"
Casey snorted. "What do you know about goats, if anything?" he asked
mysteriously.
Jim Cassidy eyed Casey sidelong through a silence. Then he brought his
palm down flat on his thigh and laughed.
"You pass," he stated, with a relieved sigh. "He's a dinger, ain't he?"
"You know 'im, all right." Casey also laughed and put out his hand. "If
you're a friend of Kenner's, shake hands with Casey Ryan! He's damned
glad to meet yuh--an' you can ask anybody if that ain't the truth."
After that the acquaintance progressed more smoothly. By the time
Casey spread his bed close alongside the car--he knew just how much
booze Jim Cassidy carried, just what Cassidy expected to make off the
load, and a good many other bits of information of no particular use to
Casey.
A strange, inner excitement held Casey awake long after Jim Cassidy was
asleep snoring. He lay looking up into the leafy branches of the
sycamore beside him and watched a star slip slowly across an open space
between the branches. Farther up the grove a hilarious group of young
hikers sang snatches of songs to the uncertain accompaniment of a
ukelele. A hundred feet away on his right, occasional cars went
coasting past on the down grade, coming in off the desert, or climbed
more slowly with motors working, on their way up from the valley below.
The shifting brilliance from their headlights flicked the grove
capriciously as they went by. Now and then a car stopped. One, a big,
high-powered car with one dazzling spotlight swung into the narrow
driveway and entered the grove.
Casey lifted his head like a desert turtle and blinked curiously at the
car as it eased past him a few feet and stopped. A gloved hand went
out to the spotlight and turned it slowly, lighting the grove foot by
foot and pausing to dwell upon each silent, parked car. Casey sat up in
the blankets and waited.
Luck, he told himself, was grinning at him from ear to ear. For this
was Smiling Lou himself, and none other. He was alone,--a big, hungry,
official fish searching the grove greedily. Casey swallowed a grin and
tried to look scared. The light was slowly working around in his
direction.
I don't suppose Casey Ryan had ever looked really scared in his life.
His face simply refused to wear so foreign an expression. Therefore,
when the spotlight finally revealed him, Casey blinked against it with
a half-hearted grin, as if he had been caught at something foolish.
The light remained upon him, and Smiling Lou got out of the car and
came back to him slowly.
Not even Casey thought of calling Smiling Lou a fool. He couldn't be
and play the game he was playing. Smiling Lou said nothing whatever
until he had looked the car over carefully (giving the license number a
second sharp glance) and had regarded Casey fixedly while he made up
his mind.
"Hullo! Where's your pardner?" he demanded then.
"I'm in pardnerships with myself this trip," Casey retorted. He waited
while Smiling Lou looked him over again, more carefully this time.
"Where did you get that car?"
"From Kenner--for sixteen-hundred and seventeen dollars and five
cents." Casey fumbled in the blankets--Smiling Lou following his
movements suspiciously--and got out the makings of a cigarette.
"Got any booze in that car?" Smiling Lou might have been a traffic
cop, for all the trace of humanity there was in his voice.
Casey cocked an eye up at him, sent a quick glance toward the Ford, and
looked back into Smiling Lou's face. He hunched his shoulders and
finished the making of his cigarette.
"I wisht you wouldn't look," he said glumly. "I got half my outfit in
there an' I hate to have it tore up."
Smiling Lou continued to look at him, seeming slightly puzzled. But
indecision was not one of his characteristics, evidently. He stepped up
to the car, pulled a flashlight from his pocket and looked in.
Casey was up and into his clothes by the time Smiling Lou had uncovered
a box or two. Smiling Lou turned toward him, his lips twitching.
"Lift this stuff out of here and put it in my car," he commanded,
elation creeping into his voice in spite of himself. "My Lord! The
chances you fellows take! Think a dab of paint is going to cover up a
brand burnt into the wood?"
Casey looked startled, glancing down into the car to where Smiling Lou
pointed.
"The boards is turned over on all the rest," he muttered
confidentially. "I dunno how that darned Canadian Club sign got right
side up."
"What all have you got?" Smiling Lou lowered his voice when he asked
the question. Casey tried not to grin when he replied. Smiling Lou
gasped,
"Well, get it into my car, and make it snappy."
Casey made it as snappy as he could, and kept his face straight until
Smiling Lou spoke to him sharply.
"I won't take you in to-night with me. I want that car. You drive it
into headquarters first thing in the morning. And don't think you can
beat it, either. I'll have the road posted. You can knock a good deal
off your sentence if you crank up and come in right after breakfast.
And make it an early breakfast, too."
His manner was stern, his voice perfectly official. But Casey, eyeing
him grimly, saw distinctly the left eyelid lower and lift again.
"All right--I'm the goat," he surrendered and sat down again on his
canvas-covered bed. He did not immediately crawl between the blankets,
however, because interesting things were happening over at Jim
Cassidy's car.
Casey watched Jim Cassidy go picking his way amongst the tree roots and
camp litter, his back straightened under the load of hootch he was
carrying to Smiling Lou's car. With Jim Cassidy also, Smiling Lou was
crisply official. When the last of the hootch had been transferred,
Casey heard Smiling Lou tell Jim Cassidy to drive in to headquarters
after breakfast next morning--but he did not see Smiling Lou wink when
he said it.
After that, Smiling Lou started his motor and drove slowly up through
the grove, halting to scan each car as he passed. He swung out through
the upper driveway, turned sharply there and came back down the highway
speeding up on the downhill grade to San Bernardino.
Jim Cassidy came furtively over and settle down for a whispered
conference on Casey's bed.
"How much did he get off'n YOU?" he asked inquisitively. "Did he clean
yuh out?"
"Clean as a last year's bone in a kioty den," Casey declared, hiding
his satisfaction as best he could. "Never got my roll though."
"He wouldn't--not with you workin' on the inside. Guess it must be
kinda touchy around here right now. New officers, mebby. He wouldn't
a' cleaned us out if we'd a' been safe. He never came into camp
before--not when I've been here. Made that same play to you, didn't
he--about givin' yourself up in the morning? Uh course yuh know what
that means--DON'T!"
"He shore is foxy, all right," Casey commented with absolute sincerity.
"You can ask anybody if he didn't pull it off like the pleasure was all
his'n. No L. A. traffic cop ever pinched me an I looked like he
enjoyed it more."
"Oh, Lou's cute, all right. They don't any of 'em put anything over on
Lou. You must be new at the business, ain't yuh?"
"Second trip," Casey informed him with an air of importance--which he
really felt, by the way. "What Casey's studyin' on now, is the next
move. No use hangin' around here empty. What do YOU figger on doin'?"
"Well, Lou didn't give no tip--not to me, anyway. So I guess it'll be
safe to drive on in to the city and load up again. I got a feller with
me--he caught a ride in to San Berdoo; left just before you drove in.
Know where to go in the city? 'Cause I can ride in with you, an' let
him foller."
"That'll suit me fine," Casey declared. And so they left it for the
time being, and Cassidy went back to bed.
A great load had dropped from Casey's shoulders, and he was asleep
before Jim Cassidy had ceased to turn restlessly in his blankets.
Getting the White Mule out of his car and into the car of Smiling Lou
had been the task which Nolan had set for him. What was to happen
thereafter Casey could only guess, for Nolan had not told him. And such
was the Casey Ryan nature that he made no attempt to solve the problems
which Mack Nolan had calmly reserved for himself.
He did not dream, for instance, that Mack Nolan had watched him load
the stuff into Smiling Lou's car. He did know that an unobtrusive
Cadillac roadster was parked at the next campfire. It had come in half
an hour behind him, but the driver had not made any move toward camping
until after dark. Casey had glanced his way when the car was parked
and the driver got out and began fussing around the car, but he had not
been struck with any sense of familiarity in the figure.
There was no reason why he should. Thousands and thousands of men are
of Mack Nolan's height and general build. This man looked like a
doctor or a dentist perhaps. Beyond the matter of size, similarity to
Mack Nolan ceased. The Cadillac man wore a vandyke beard and colored
glasses, and a panama and light gray business suit. Casey set him down
in his mental catalog as "some town feller" and assumed that they had
nothing in common.
Yet Mack Nolan heard nearly every word spoken by Smiling Lou, Casey and
Jim Cassidy. (Readers are so inquisitive about these things that I
felt I ought to tell you--else you'll be worrying as hard as Casey Ryan
did later on. I'm soft-hearted, myself; I never like to worry a reader
more than is absolutely necessary. So I'm letting you in, hoping you'll
get an added kick out of Casey's further maneuvers).
The Cadillac car, I should explain, was only one of Mack Nolan's little
secrets. There is a very good garage at Goffs, not many miles from
Juniper Wells. A matter of an hour's driving was sufficient at any
time for Mack Nolan to make the exchange. And no man at Goffs would
think it very strange that the owner of a Cadillac should prefer to
drive a Ford over rough, desert trails to his prospect in the
mountains. Mack Nolan, as I have told you before, had a way with him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
With a load of booze in the car and Jim Cassidy by his side, Casey Ryan
drove down the long, eucalyptus-shaded avenue that runs past the
balloon school at Arcadia and turned into the Foothill Boulevard. Half
a mile farther on a Cadillac roadster honked and slid past them,
speeding away toward Monrovia. But Casey Ryan was busy talking
chummily with Jim Cassidy, and he scarcely knew that a car had passed.
The money he had been given for Smiling Lou had been used to pay for
this new load of whisky, and Casey found himself wishing that he could
get word of it to Mack Nolan. Still, Nolan's oversight in the matter
of arranging for communication between them did not bother Casey much.
He was doing his part; if Mack Nolan failed to do his, that was no
fault of Casey Ryan's.
At Fontana, where young Kenner had stopped for gas on that eventful
first trip of Casey's, Casey slowed down also, for the same purpose,
half tempted to call up the Little Woman on long distance while the gas
tank was being filled. But presently the matter went clean from his
mind--and this was the reason:
A speed cop whose motorcycle stood inconspicuously around the corner of
the garage, came forward and eyed the Ford sharply. He drew his little
book from his pocket, turned a few leaves, found what he was looking
for and eyed again the car. The garage man, slowly turning the crank
of the gasoline pump, looked at him inquiringly; but the speed cop
ignored the look and turned to Casey.
"Where'd you get this car?" he demanded, in much the same tone which
Smiling Lou had used the night before.
"Bought it," Casey told him gruffly.
"Where did you buy it?"
"Over at Goffs, just this side of Needles."
"Got a bill of sale?"
"You got Casey Ryan's word fer it," Casey retorted, with a growing heat
inside, where he kept his temper when he wasn't using it.
"Are you Casey Ryan?" The speed cop's eyes hardened just a bit.
"Anybody says I ain't, you send 'em to me--an' then come around in
about ten minutes an' look 'em over."
"What's YOUR name?" The officer turned to Jim Cassidy.
"Tom Smith. I was just ketchin' a ride with this feller. Don't go an'
mix ME in--I ain't no ways concerned; just ketchin' a ride is all. If
I'd 'a' knowed--"
"You can explain that to the judge. Get in there, you, and drive in to
San Berdoo. I'll be right with you, so you needn't forget the road!"
He stepped back to his motorcycle and pushed it forward.
"Hey! Don't I git paid fer my gas?" the garage man wailed, pulling a
dripping nozzle from Casey's gas tank.
"Aw, go tahell!" Casey grunted, and threw a wadded bank note in his
direction. "Take that an' shut up. What yuh cryin' around about a
gallon uh gas, fer? YOU ain't pinched!"
The money landed near the motorcycle and the officer picked it up,
smoothed out the bill, glanced at it and looked through tightened lids
at Casey.
"Throwin' money around like a hootch-runner!" he sneered. "I guess you
birds need lookn' after, all right. Git goin'!"
Casey "got going." Twice on the way in the officer spurted up
alongside and waved him down for speeding. Casey had not intended to
speed, either. He was merely keeping pace unconsciously with his
thoughts.
He had been told just what he must do if he were arrested for
bootlegging, but he was not at all certain that his instructions would
cover an arrest for stealing an automobile. Nolan had forgotten about
that, he guessed. But Casey's optimism carried him jauntily to jail in
San Bernardino, and while he was secretly a bit uneasy, he was not half
so worried as Jim Cassidy appeared to be.
Casey was booked--along with "Tom Smith"--on two charges: theft of one
Ford car, motor number so-and-so, serial number this-and-that, model,
touring, year, whatever-it-was. And, unlawful transportation of
spirituous liquor. He tried to give the judge the wink, but without
any happy result. So he eventually found himself locked in a cell with
Jim Cassidy.
Just at first, Casey Ryan was proud of the part he was playing. He
could look with righteous toleration upon the limpness of his fellow
prisoner. He could feel secure in the knowledge that he, Casey Ryan,
was an agent of the government engaged in helping to uphold the laws of
his country.
He waited for an hour or two, listening with a superior kind of
patience to Jim Cassidy's panicky unbraidings of his luck. At first
Jim was inclined to blame Casey rather bitterly for the plight he was
in. But Casey soon stopped that. Young Kenner was the responsible
party in this mishap, as Casey very soon made plain to Jim.
"Well, I dunno but what you're right. It WAS kind of a dirty
trick--workin' a stole car off onto you. Why didn't he pick some
sucker on the outside? Don't line up with Kenner, somehow. Well, I
guess mebby Smilin' Lou can see us out uh this hole all right--only I
don't like that car-stealin' charge. Mebby Kenner an' Lou can
straighten it up, though."
Casey wondered if they could. He wondered, too, how Nolan was going to
find out about Smiling Lou getting the camouflaged White Mule. Nolan
had not explained that to Casey--but Casey was not worrying yet. His
faith in Mack Nolan was firm.
Came bedtime, however, with no sign of official favor toward Casey
Ryan. Casey began to wonder. But probably, he consoled himself with
thinking, they meant to wait until Jim Cassidy was asleep before they
turned Casey loose. He lay on the hard bunk and waited hopefully,
listening to the stertorous breathing of Jim Cassidy, who had forgotten
his troubles in sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
At noon the next day Casey was still waiting--but not hopefully.
"Patience on a monument" couldn't have resembled Casey Ryan in any
particular whatever. He was mad. By midnight he had begun to wonder
if he was not going to be made a goat again. By daylight, he was
positive that he was already a goat. By the time the trusty brought
his breakfast, Casey was applying to Mack Nolan the identical words and
phrases which he had applied to young Kenner when he was the maddest.
Don't ask me to tell you what they were.
Jim Cassidy still clung desperately to his faith in Smiling Lou; but
Casey's faith hadn't so much as a finger-hold on anything. What kind of
a government was it, he asked himself bitterly, that would leave a
trusted agent twenty-four hours shut up in a cell with a whining crook
like Jim Cassidy? If, he added pessimistically, he were an agent of
the government. Casey doubted it. So far as he could see, Casey Ryan
wasn't anything but the goat.
His chief desire now was to get out of there as soon as possible so
that he could hunt up Mack Nolan and lick the livin' tar wit of him--or
worse. He wanted bail and he wanted it immediately. Not a soul bad
come near him, save the trusty, in spite of certain mysterious messages
which Casey had sent to the office, asking for an interview with the
judge or somebody; Casey didn't care who. Locked in a cell, how was he
going to do any of the things Nolan had told him to do if he happened
to find himself arrested by an honest officer?
When they hauled him before the police judge, Casey hadn't been given
the chance to explain anything to anybody. Unless, of course, he
wanted to beller out his business before everybody; and that, he told
himself fiercely, was not Casey Ryan's idea of the way to keep a
secret. Moreover, that damned speed cop was standing right there, just
waiting for a chance to wind his fingers in Casey's collar and choke
him off if he tried to say a word. And how the hell, Casey would like
to know, was a man going to explain himself when he couldn't get a word
in edgeways?
So Casey wanted bail. There were just two ways of getting it, and it
went against the grain of his pride to take either one. That is why
Casey waited until noon before his Irish stubbornness yielded a bit and
he decided to wire me to come. He had to slip the wire out by the
underground method--meaning the good will of the trusty. It cost Casey
ten dollars, but he didn't grudge that.
He spent that afternoon and most of the night mentally calling the
trusty a liar and a thief because there was no reply to the message. As
a matter of fact, the trusty sent the wire through as quickly as
possible and the fault was mine if any one's. I was too busy hurrying
to the rescue to think about sending Casey word that I was coming.
Casey said afterwards that my thoughtlessness would be cured for life
if I were ever locked in jail and waiting for news.
As it happened, I wired the Little Woman that Casey was in jail again,
and caught the first train to San "Berdoo"--coming down by way of
Barstow. I could save two or three hours that way, I found, so I told
the Little Woman to meet me there and bring all the money she could get
her hands on. Not knowing just what Casey was in for this time, it
seemed well to be prepared for a good, stiff bail. She beat me by
several hours, and between us we had ten thousand dollars.
At that it was a fool's errand. Casey was out of jail and gone before
either of us arrived. So there we were, holding the bag, as you might
say, and our ten thousand dollars' bail money.
"It's no use asking questions, Jack," the Little Woman told me
pensively when we had finished our salad in the best cafe in town, and
were waiting for the fish. "I've asked questions of every uniform in
this town, from the district judge down to the courthouse janitor.
Nobody knows a thing. I DID find that Casey was booked yesterday for
having a stolen car and a load of booze in his possession, but he isn't
in jail--or if he is, they're keeping him down in some dungeon and have
thrown away the key. It was hinted in the police court that he was
dismissed for want of evidence; but they wouldn't SAY anything, and so
there you are!"
We finished our fish in a thoughtful silence. Then, when the waiter
had removed the plates, the Little Woman looked at me with a twinkle in
her eyes.
"Well-sir, there's something I want to tell you, Jack. I believe Casey
has put this town on the run. They can't tell ME! Something's
happened, over around the courthouse. A lot of the men I talked with
had a scared look in their eyes, and they were nervous when doors
opened, and looked around when people came walking along. I don't know
what he's been doing--but Casey Ryan's been up to something. You can't
tell ME! I know how our laundry boy looks when Casey's home."
"And didn't you get any line at all on his whereabouts?" I asked her.
Given three hours the start of me, I knew perfectly well that the
Little Woman had found out all there was to know about Casey.
"Well-sir--I've got this to go on," the Little Woman drawled and held a
telegram across the table. "You'll notice that was sent from Goffs.
It's ten days old, but I've been getting ready ever since it arrived.
I've put Babe in a boarding-school, and I leased the apartment house.
I kept three dressmakers ruining their eyes with nightwork, Jack,
making up some nifty sports clothes. If Casey's bound to stay in the
desert--well, I'm his wife--and Casey does kind of like to have me
around. You can't tell ME.
"So I've got the twin-six packed with the niftiest camp outfit you ever
saw, Jack. I've got a yellow and red beach umbrella, and two reclining
chairs, and--well-sir, I'm going to rough it de luxe. I don't expect
to keep Casey in hand--I happen to know him. But it's just possible,
Jack, that I can keep him in sight!"
Of course I told her--as I've told her often enough before--that she
was a brick. I added that I would go along, if she liked; which she
did. Not even the Little Woman should ever attempt to drive across the
Mojave alone.
We started out as soon as we had finished the meal. A Cadillac
roadster came up behind us and honked for clear passing as we swung
into the long, straight stretch that leads up the Cajon. The Little
Woman peered into the rear vision mirror and pressed the toe of her
white pump upon the accelerator.
"There's only one man in the world that can pass ME on the road," the
Little Woman drawled, "and he doesn't wear a panama!"
As we snapped around the turns of Cajon Grade, I looked back once or
twice. The Cadillac roadster was still following pertinaciously, but
it was too far back to honk at us. When we slid down to the
Victorville garage and stopped for gas, the Cadillac slid by. The
driver in the panama gave us one glance through his colored glasses,
but I felt, somehow, that the glance was sufficiently comprehensive to
fix us firmly in his memory. I inquired at the garage concerning Casey
Ryan, taking it for granted he would be driving a Ford. A man of that
description had stopped at the garage for gas that forenoon, the boy
told me. About nine o'clock, I learned from further questioning.
"Well-sir, that gives him five hours the start," the Little Woman
remarked, as she eased in the clutch and slid around the corner into
the highway to Barstow. "But you can't tell me I can't run down a Ford
with this car. I know to the last inch what a Jawn Henry is good for.
I drove one myself, remember. Now we'll see."
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
At Dagget, the big, blue car with a lady driver sounded the warning
signal and passed Mack Nolan and the Cadillac roadster. Like Casey
Ryan, Nolan is rather proud of his driving, and with sufficient reason.
He was already hurrying, not to overhaul Casey, but to arrive soon
after him.
Women drivers loved to pass other cars with a sudden spurt of speed, he
had found by experience. They were not, however, consistently fast
drivers. Mack Nolan was conscious of a slight irritation when the
twin-six took the lead. Somewhere ahead--probably in one of the rough,
sandy stretches--he would either have to pass that car or lag behind.
Your expert driver likes a clear road ahead.
So Mack Nolan drove a bit harder, and succeeded in getting most of the
dust kicked up by the big, blue car. He counted on passing before they
reached Ludlow, but he could never quite make it. In that ungodly
stretch of sand and rocks and chuck-holes that lies between Ludlow and
Amboy, Nolan was sure that the woman driver would have to slow down.
He swore a little, too, because she would probably slow down just where
passing was impossible. They always did.
They went through Amboy like one party, the big, blue car leading by
twenty-five yards. It was a long drive for a woman to make; a hard
drive to boot. He wondered if the two in the big car ever ate.
Five miles east of Amboy, when a red sunset was darkening to starlight,
the blue car, fifty yards in the lead, overhauled a Ford in trouble.
In the loose, sandy trail the big car slowed and stopped abreast of the
Ford. There was no passing now, unless Mack Nolan wanted to risk
smashing his crank-case on a lava rock, millions of which peppered that
particular portion of the Mojave Desert. He stopped perforce.
A pair of feet with legs attached to them, protruded from beneath the
running board of the Ford. The Little Woman in the big car leaned over
the side and studied the feet critically.
"Casey Ryan, are those the best pair of shoes you own?" she drawled at
last. "If you wouldn't wear such rundown heels, you know, you wouldn't
look so bow-legged. I've told you and TOLD you that your legs aren't
so bad when you wear straight heels."
Casey Ryan crawled out and looked up at her grinning sheepishly.
"They was all right when I left home, ma'am," he defended his shoes
mildly. "Desert plays hell with shoe leather--you can ask anybody."
Then he added, "Hullo, Jack! What you two think you're doin', anyway.
Tryin' t' elope?"
"Why, hello, Ryan!" Mack Nolan greeted, coming up from the Cadillac.
"Having trouble with your car?" Casey whirled and eyed Nolan dubiously.
"Naw. This ain't no trouble," he granted. "I only been here four hours
or so--this is pastime!"
There was an awkward silence. We in the blue car wanted to know (not
at that time knowing) who was the man in the Cadillac roadster, and how
he happened to know Casey so well. Nolan, no doubt, wanted to know who
we were. And there was so much that Casey wanted to know and needed to
know that he couldn't seem to think of anything. However, Casey was the
hardest to down. He came up to the side of the blue car, reached in
with his hands all greasy black, and took the Little Woman's hand from
the wheel and kissed it. The Little Woman made a caressing sound and
leaned out to him--and Nolan and I felt that we mustn't look. So our
eyes met.
He came around to my side of the car and put out his hand.
"I'm pretty good at guessing," he smiled. "I guess you're Jack
Gleason. Casey has talked of you to me. I'm right glad to meet you,
too. My name is Mack Nolan, and I'm Irish. I'm Casey Ryan's partner.
We have a good--prospect."
Casey looked past the Little Woman and me, straight into Mack Nolan's
eyes. I felt something of an electric quality in the air while their
gaze held.
"I'm just getting back from a trip down in the valley," Nolan observed
easily. "You never did see me in town duds, did you, Casey?" His eyes
went to the Little Woman's face and then to me. "I suppose you know
what this wild Irishman has just pulled off back there," he said,
tilting his head toward San Bernardino, many a mile away to the
southwest. "You wouldn't think it to look at him, but he surely has
thrown a monkey wrench into as pretty a bootlegging machine as there is
in the country. It's such confidential stuff, of course, that you may
call it absolutely secret. But for once I'm telling the truth about it.
"Your husband, Mrs. Casey Ryan, holds a commission from headquarters as
a prohibition officer. A deputy, it is true,--but commissioned
nevertheless. He's just getting back from a very pretty piece of work.
A crooked officer named Smiling Lou was arrested last night. He had all
kinds of liquor cached away in his house. Casey can tell you sometime
how he trapped him.
"Of course, I'm just an amateur mining expert on a vacation, myself."
His eyes met Casey's straight. "I wasn't with him when he pulled the
deal, but I heard about it afterwards, and I knew he was planning
something of the sort when he left camp. How I happened to know about
the commission," he added, reaching into his pocket, "is because he
left it with me for safe keeping. I'm going to let you look at
it--just in case he's too proud to let it out of his hands once I give
it back.
"Now, of course, I'm talking like an old woman and telling all Casey's
secrets--and you'll probably see a real Irish fight when he gets in
reach of me. But I knew he hadn't told you exactly what he's doing,
and--I personally feel that his wife and his best friend are entitled
to know as much as his partner knows about him."
The Little Woman nodded absently her thanks. She was holding Casey's
commission under the dash-light to read it.
I saw Casey gulp once or twice while he stared across the car at Mack
Nolan. He pushed his dusty, black hat forward over one eyebrow and
reached into his pocket.
"Aw, hell," he grunted, grinning queerly. "You come around here oncet,
Mr. Nolan, where I can git my hands on yuh!"
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