Casey Ryan
CHAPTER XVIII
Casey was restless, and his restlessness manifested itself in a mostunusual pessimism. Twice he picked up "float" that showed the clean indigostain of silver bromyrite in spots the size of a split pea, and cast thepiece from him as if it were so much barren limestone, without everinvestigating to see where it had come from. Little as I know aboutmineral, I am sure that one piece at least was rich; high-grade, if ever Isaw any. But Casey merely grunted when I spoke to him about it.
"Maybe it is. A coupla hundred ounces, say. What's that, even with silverat a dollar an ounce? It ain't good enough for Casey, and what I'm wastin'my time for, wearing the heels off'n my shoes prospectin' Starvation, issomethin' I can't tell yuh." He looked at me with his pale-blue, unwinkingstare for a minute.
"Er--I can--and I guess the quicker it's out the better I'll feel."
He took out his familiar plug of tobacco, always nibbled around the edges,always half the size of his four fingers. I never saw Casey with a freshplug in his pocket, and I never saw him down to one chew; it is one of thelittle mysteries in his life that I never quite solved.
"I been thinkin' about that devil's lantern we seen the other night," hesaid, when he had returned to his pocket the plug with a corner gone."They's something funny about that--the way it went over there and stoodon the Tippipahs again. I ain't sooperstitious. But I can't git thingsouta my head. I want to go hunt fer that mine of Injun Jim's. This here isjust foolin' around--huntin' silver. I want to see where that free goldcomes from that he used to peddle. It's mine--by rights. He was goin' totell me where it was, you recollect, and he woulda if I hadn't overfed himon jam--or if that damn squaw hadn't took a notion for marryin'. I let herstampede me--and that's where I was wrong. I shoulda stayed."
I was foolish enough to argue with him. I had talked with others about themine of Injun Jim, and one man (who owned cattle and called mines agamble) told me that he doubted the whole story. A prospectors' bubble, hecalled it. Free gold, he insisted, did not belong in this particularformation; it ran in porphyry, he said,--and then he ran into mineralogytoo technical for me now. I repeated his statement, however, and saw Caseygrin tolerantly.
"Gold is where yuh find it," he retorted, and spat after a hurryinglizard. "They said gold couldn't be found in that formation aroundGoldfield. But they found it, didn't they?"
Casey looked at me steadily for a minute and then came out with what wasreally in his mind. "You stake me to grub and a couple of burros an' letme go hunt the Injun Jim, and I'll locate yuh in on it when I find it. Andif I don't find it, I'll pay yuh back for the outfit. And, anyway, you'remakin' money off'n my bad luck right along, ain't yuh? Wasn't it me youwas writin' up, these last few days?"
"I was--er--reconsidering that devil's lantern yarn you told me, Casey.But the thing doesn't work out right. It sounds unfinished, as you toldit. I don't know that I can do anything with it, after all." I wastruthful with him; you all remember that I was dissatisfied with the wayCasey ended it. Just walking back across the desert and quitting thesearch,--it lacked, somehow, the dramatic climax. I could have built one,of course. But I wanted to test out my theory that a man like Casey willlive a complete drama if he is left alone. Casey is absolutely natural; hegoes out after life without waiting for it to come to him, and he willforget all about his own interests to help a stranger,--and above all, hebuilds his castles hopefully as a child and seeks always to make themsubstantial structures afterwards. If any man can prove my theory, thatman is Casey Ryan. So I led him along to say what dream held him now.
"Unfinished? Sure it's unfinished! I quit, didn't I tell yuh? It ain'tgoin' to be finished till I git out and find that mine. I been studyin'things over. I never seen one of them lights till I started out to findInjun Jim's mine. If I'd a-gone along with no bad luck, I wouldn't nevera-found that tenderfoot camp, would I? It was keepin' the light at my backdone that--and William not likin' the look of it, either. And you gottaadmit it was the light mostly that scared them young dudes off and left methe things. And if you'd of saw Injun Jim, you'd of known same as I thatit was the jam and the silk shirts that loosened him up. Nothin' in myown pack coulda won him over,--"
"It's all right that far," I cut in. "But then he died, and you were setafoot and all but married by as venomous a creature as I ever heard of,and the thing stops right there, Casey, where it shouldn't."
"And that's what I'm kickin' about! Casey Ryan ain't the man to let itstop there. I been thinkin' it over sence that devil's lantern showed upagain, and went and set over there on Tippipah. Mebby I misjudged thedog-gone thing. Mebby it's settin' somewheres around that gold mine. Funnyit never showed up no other time and no other place. I been travelin' thedesert off'n on all my life, and I never seen anything like it before.And I can tell yuh this much: I been wanting that mine too darn long togive up now. If you don't feel like stakin' me for the trip, I'll go backto Lund and have a talk with Bill. Bill's a good old scout and he'llstake me to an outfit, anyway."
That was merely Casey's inborn optimism speaking. Bill was a good oldscout, all right, but if he would grubstake Casey to go hunting the InjunJim mine, then Bill had changed considerably.
The upshot of it was that we left Starvation the next morning, headed fortown. And two days after that I had pulled myself out of bed at daybreakto walk down to his camp under the mesquite grove just outside of town. Idrank a cup of coffee with him and wished him luck. Casey did not talkmuch. His mind was all taken up with the details of his starting,--whetherto trust his water cans on the brown burro or the gray, and whether he hadtaken enough "cold" shoes along for the mule. And he set down his cup ofcoffee to go rummaging in a kyack just to make sure that he had the hoofrasp and shoeing hammer safe.
He was packed and moving up the little hill out of the grove before thesun had more than painted a cloud or two in the east. A dreamer once moregone to find the end of his particular rainbow, I told myself, as Iwatched him out of sight. I must admit that I hoped, down deep in theheart of me, that Casey would fall into some other unheard-of experiencesuch as had been his portion in the past. I felt much more certain that hewould get into some scrape than I did that he would find the Injun Jim,and I was grinning inside when I went back to town; though there was a bitof envy in the smile,--one must always envy the man who keeps his dreamsthrough all the years and banks on them to the end. For myself, I hadn'tchased a rainbow for thirty years, and I could not call myself the betterfor it, either.
* * * * *
In September the lower desert does not seem to realize that summer isgoing. The wind blows a little harder, perhaps, and frequently a littlehotter; the nights are not quite so sweltering, and the very sheets onone's bed do not feel so freshly baked. But up on the higher mesas thereis a heady quality to the wind that blows fresh in your face. There is anIndian-summery haze like a thin veil over the farthest mountain ranges.Summer is with you yet; but somehow you feel that winter is coming.
In a country all gray and dull yellow and brown, you find strange,beautiful tints no artist has yet prisoned with his paints. You dream inspite of yourself, and walk through a world no more than half real, aworld peopled with your thoughts.
Casey did, when the burros left him in peace long enough. They weremisleading, pot-bellied animals that Casey hazed before him toward theTippipahs. They never showed more than slits of eyes beneath theirdrooping lids, yet they never missed seeing whatever there was to see, andtaking advantage of every absent-minded moment when Casey was thinking ofthe Injun Jim, perhaps. They were fast-walking burros when they werefollowing a beaten trail and Casey was hard upon their heels, but when hisattention wandered they showed a remarkable amount of energy in findingblind trails and following them into some impracticable wash where Caseywasted a good deal of time in extricating them. He said he never sawburros that hated so to turn around and go back into the road, and henever saw two burros get out of sight as quickly as they could when theythought he wasn't watching. They wo
uld choose different directions andhide from him separately,--but once was enough for Casey. He lost themboth for an hour in the sand pits twelve miles out of town, and after thathe tied them nose to tail and himself held a rope attached to thehindmost, and so made fair time with them, after all.
The mule, Casey said, was just plain damn mule, sloughed off from thearmy, blase beyond words,--any words at Casey's command, at least. Alopeared buckskin mule with a hanging lower lip and a chronictail-switching, that shacked along hour after hour and saved Casey's legsand, more particularly, a bunion that had developed in the past year.
Casey knew the country better than he had known it on his firstunprofitable trip into the Tippipahs. He avoided Furnace Lake, keepingwell around the Southern rim of it and making straight for Loco Canyon andthe spring there while his water cans still had a pleasant slosh. There herested his longears for a day, and disinterred certain tenderfoot luxurieswhich he had cached when he was there last time. And when he set out againhe went straight on to the old stone hut where Injun Jim had camped. Thetepee was gone, burned down according to Indian custom after a death, ashe had expected. The herd of Indian ponies were nowhere in sight.Hahnaga's brother, he guessed, had driven them off long ago.
Casey had worked out a theory, bit by bit, and with characteristicoptimism he had full faith that it would prove a fact later on. He wantedto start his search from the point where Injun Jim had started, and he hadrather a plausible reason for doing so.
Injun Jim was an Indian of the old school, and the old school did a greatdeal of its talking by signs. Casey had watched Jim with that pale,unwinking stare that misses nothing within range, and he had read thesignificance of Jim's unconscious gestures while he talked. It had beenpurely subconscious; Casey had expected the exact location of the mine inwords, and perhaps with a crudely accurate map of Jim's making. But now heremembered Jim's words, certain motions made by the skinny hands, and fromthem he laid his course.
"He was layin' right here--facin' south," Casey told himself, squatting onhis heels within the rock circle that marked the walls of the tepee. "Hesaid, 'Got heap big gol' mine, me--' and he turned his hand that way."Casey squinted at the distant blue ridge that was an unnamed spur of theTippipahs. "It's far enough so an old buck like him couldn't make it verywell. Fifteen mile, anyway--mebby twenty or twenty-five. And from the signtalk he made whilst he was talkin', I'd guess it's nearer twenty thanfifteen. There's that two-peak butte--looks like that would be about rightfor distance. And it's dead in line--them old bucks don't waggle theirhands permiskus when they talk. Old Jim woulda laid on his hands if he'dknovved what they was tellin' me; but even an ornery old devil like himgits careless when they git old. Casey hits straight fer Two Peak."
That's the way he got his bearings; just remembering the unguarded motionof Injun Jim's grimy hand and adding thereto his superficial knowledge ofthe country and his own estimate of what an old fellow like Jim could calla long journey. With this and the unquestioning faith in his dream thatwas a part of him, Casey threw his favorite "packer's hitch" across thepacked burros at dawn next morning, boarded his buckskin mule and set offhopefully across the barren valley, heading straight for the distant buttehe called Two Peak.