CHAPTER III
The world was palpably a triangle, baseless to southward; walled out byiron, radiant ramparts--a black range, gateless, on the east; a grayrange on the west, broken, spiked, and bristling. At the northern limitof vision the two ranges closed together to what seemed relatively thesharp apex of the triangle, the mere intersection of two lines. Thispoint, this seemingly dimensionless dot, was in reality two score wearymiles of sandhills, shapeless, vague, and low; waterless, colorless,and forlorn. Southward the central desert was uninhabitable; opinionsdiffered about the edges.
Still in Arizona, the eye wearied; miles and leagues slid together toindistinguishable inches. Then came a low line of scattered hills thatroughly marked the Mexican border.
The mirage played whimsical pranks with these outpost hills. They became,in turn, cones, pyramids, boxes, benches, chimney stacks, hourglasses.Sometimes they soared high in air, like the kites of a baby god; and,beneath, the unbroken desert stretched afar, wavering, misty, and dim.
Again, on clear, still days, these hills showed crystalline, thin, icy,cameo-sharp; beyond, between, faint golden splotches of broad Sonoranplain faded away to nothingness; and, far beyond that nothingness, hazySonoran peaks of dimmest blue rose from illimitable immensities, liketopmasts of a very large ship on a very small globe; and the earth wasreally round, as alleged.
It was fitting and proper that the desert, as a whole, had no name: thespinning earth itself has none. Inconsiderable nooks and corners werenamed, indeed--Crow Flat, the Temporal, Moonshine, the Rinconada. Itshould rather be said, perhaps, that the desert had no accepted name.Alma Mater, Lungs called it. But no one minded Lungs.
Mr. Stanley Mitchell woke early in the Blue Bedroom to see the morningmade. He threw back the tarpaulin and sat up, yawning; with every line ofhis face crinkled up, ready to laugh for gladness.
The morning was shaping up well. Glints of red snapped and sparkled inthe east; a few late stars loitered along the broad, clean skies. A jerkyclatter of iron on rock echoed from the cliffs. That was the four hobbledhorses, browsing on the hillside: they snuffed and snorted cheerfully,rejoicing in the freshness of dawn. From a limestone bluff, ten feetbehind the bed, came a silver tinkle of falling water from a spring,dripping into its tiny pool.
Stan drew in a great breath and snuffed, exactly as the horses snuffedand from the same reason--to express delight; just as a hungry man smackshis lips over a titbit. Pungent, aromatic, the odor of wood smoke alloyedthe taintless air of dawn. The wholesome smell of clean, brown earth, thespicy tang of crushed herb and shrub, of cedar and juniper, mingled witha delectable and savory fragrance of steaming coffee and sizzling,spluttering venison.
Pete Johnson sat cross-legged before the fire. This mess of venison wasno hit-or-miss affair; he was preparing a certain number of venisonsteaks, giving to each separate steak the consideration of an artist.
Stanley Mitchell kicked the blankets flying. "Whoo-hoo-oo! This is thelife!" he proclaimed. Orisons more pious have held less gratitude.
He tugged on one boot, reached for the other--and then leaped to his feetlike a jack-in-the-box. With the boot in his hand he pointed to thesouth. High on the next shadowy range, thirty miles away, a dozenscattered campfires glowed across the dawn.
"What the Billy-hell?" he said, startled.
"Stan-ley!"
"I will say wallop! I won't be a lady if I can't say wallop!" quoth Stanrebelliously. "What's doing over at the Gavilan? There's never been threemen at once in those fiend-forsaken pinnacles before. Hey! S'pose they'vestruck it rich, like we did?"
"I'm afraid not," sighed Pete. "You toddle along and wash um's paddies.She's most ripe."
With a green-wood poker he lifted the lid from the bake-oven. The biscuitwere not browned to his taste; he dumped the blackening coals from thelid and slid it into the glowing heart of the fire; he raked out a newbed of coals and lifted the little three-legged bake-oven over them; withhis poker he skillfully flirted fresh coals on the rimmed lid and put itback on the oven. He placed the skillet of venison on a flat rock at hiselbow and poured coffee into two battered tin cups. Breakfast was nowready, and Pete raised his voice in the traditional dinner call of theranges:
"Come and get it or I'll throw it out!"
Stanley came back from a brisk toilet at Ironspring. He took apreliminary sip of coffee, speared a juicy steak, and eyed his companiondarkly. Mr. Johnson plied knife and fork assiduously, with eyes downcastand demure.
Stanley Mitchell's smooth young face lined with suspicion.
"When you've been up to some deviltry I can always tell it on you--youlook so incredibly meek and meechin', like a cat eatin' the canary," heremarked severely. "Thank you for a biscuit. And the sugar! Now whatwarlockry is this?" He jerked a thumb at the far-off fires. "What's themerry prank?"
Mr. Johnson sighed again.
"Deception. Treachery. Mine." He looked out across the desert to theGavilan Hills with a complacent eye. "And breach of trust. Mine, again."
"Who you been betrayin' now?"
"Just you. You and your pardner; the last bein' myself. You know themlocation papers of ours I was to get recorded at Tucson?"
Stanley nodded.
"Well, now," said Pete, "I didn't file them papers. Something realcurious happened on the way in--and I reckon I'm the most superstitiousman you ever see. So I tried a little experiment. Instead, I wrote out anotice for that little old ledge we found over on the Gavilan a monthback. I filed that, just to see if any one was keeping cases on us--and Ifiled it the very last thing before I left Tucson: You see what'shappened." He waved his empty coffee-cup at the campfires. "I comeright back and we rode straight to Ironspring. But there's been peopleridin' faster than us--ridin' day and night. Son, if our copper claimshad really been in the Gavilan, instead of a-hundred-and-then-some longmiles in another-guess direction--then what?"
"We'd have found our claim jumped and a bunch to swear they'd beenworking there before the date of our notices; that they didn't find thescratch of a pick on the claim, no papers and no monument--that's whatwe'd have found."
"Correct! Pass the meat."
"But we haven't told a soul," protested Stanley. "How could any one know?We all but died of thirst getting back across the desert--the wind rubbedout our tracks; we laid up at Soledad Springs a week before any one sawus; when we finally went in to Cobre no one knew where we had been, thatwe had found anything, or even that we'd been looking for anything. Howcould any one know?"
"This breakfast is getting cold," said Pete Johnson. "Good grub hurts noone. Let's eat it. Then I'll let a little ray of intelligence filter intoyour darkened mind."
Breakfast finished, Stan piled the tin dishes with a clatter. "Now then,old Greedy! Break the news to me."
Pete considered young Stan through half-closed lids--a tanned,smooth-faced, laughing, curly-headed, broad-shouldered young giant.
"You got any enemies, pardner?"
"Not one in the world that I know of," declared Stan cheerfully.
"Back in New York, maybe?"
"Not a one. No reason to have one."
Pete shook his head reflectively.
"You're dreadful dumb, you know. Think again. Think hard. Take some one'sgirl away from him, maybe?"
"Not a girl. Never had but one Annie," said Stanley. "I'm her Joe."
"Ya-as. Back in New York. I've posted letters to her: Abingdon P.O. Nameof Selden."
Stanley went brick red.
"That's her. I'm her Joe. And when we get this little old bonanza of oursto grinding she won't be in New York any more. Come again, old-timer.What's all this piffle got to do with our mine?"
"If you only had a little brains," sighed Johnson disconsolately, "I'dsoon find out who had it in for you, and why. It's dreadful inconvenientto have a pardner like that. Why, you poor, credulous baa-lamb of atrustful idiot, when you let me go off to file them papers, don't you seeyou give me the chance to rob you of a mine worth, just as she stands,'most any a
mount of money you chance to mention? Not you! You let me rideoff without a misgivin'."
"Pish!" remarked Stan scornfully. "Twaddle! Tommyrot! Pickles!"
Pete wagged a solemn forefinger.
"If you wasn't plumb simple-minded and trustin' you would 'a' tumbledlong ago that somebody was putting a hoodoo on every play you make. Icaught on before you'd been here six months. I thought, of course, you'dbeen doin' dirt to some one--till I come to know you."
"I thank you for those kind words," grinned Mitchell; "also, for thefriendly explanation with which you cover up some bad luck and moregreenhorn's incompetence."
"No greenhorn could be so thumbhandsided as all that," rejoined Peteearnestly. "Your irrigation ditches break and wash out; cattle get intoyour crops whenever you go to town; but your fences never break whenyou're round the ranch. Notice that?"
"I did observe something of that nature," confessed Mitchell. "I laid itto sheer bad luck."
The older man snorted.
"Bad luck! You've been hoodooed! After that, you went off by yourlonesome and tried cattle. Your windmills broke down; your cattle wasstole plumb opprobrious--Mexicans blamed, of course. And the very firstwinter the sheep drifted in on you--where no sheep had never blattedbefore--and eat you out of house and home."
"I sold out in the spring," reflected Stanley. "I ran two hundred headof stock up to one hundred and twelve in six months. Go on! Your storyinterests me, strangely. I begin to think I was not as big a fool asI thought I was, and that it was foolish of me to ever think my follywas--"
Johnson interrupted him.
"Then you bought a bunch of sheep. Son, you can't realize howgreat-minded it is of me to overlook that slip of yours! You was out ofthe way of every man in the world; you was on your own range, watering atyour own wells--the only case like that on record. And the second darknight some petulant and highly anonymous cowboys run off your herder andstampeded your woollies over a bluff."
"Sheep outrages have happened before," observed Stan, rather dryly.
"Sheep outrages are perpetrated by cowmen on cow ranges," rejoined Petehotly. "I guess I ought to know. Sheepmen aren't ever killed on their ownranges; it isn't respectable. Sheepmen are all right in their place--andhell's the place."
"Peter!" said Stan. "Such langwidge!"
"Wallop! Wallop!" barked Peter, defiant and indignant. "I will saywallop! Now you shut up whilst I go on with your sad history. Son, youwas afflicted some with five-card insomnia--and right off, when you firstcame, you had it fair shoved on you by people usually most disobligin'.It wasn't just for your money; there was plenty could stack 'em higherthan you could, and them fairly achin' to be fleeced, at that. If yourhead hadn't been attached to your shoulders good and strong, if youhadn't figured to be about square, or maybe rectangular, you had achance to be a poker fiend or a booze hoist."
"You're spoofing me, old dear. Wake up; it's morning."
"Don't fool yourself, son. There was a steady organized effort to get youin bad. And it took money to get all these people after your goat. Someone round here was managin' the game, for pay. But't wasn't no Arizonahead that did the plannin'. Any Rocky Mountain roughneck mean enough forthat would 'a' just killed you once and been done with it. No, sir; thisparty was plumb civilized--this guy that wanted your goat. He wanted tospoil your rep; he probably had conscientious scruples about bloodshed.Early trainin'," said Mr. Johnson admiringly, "is a wonderful thing! And,after they found you wouldn't fall for the husks and things, they wentout to put a crimp in your bank roll. Now, who is to gain by putting youon the blink, huh?"
"No one at all," said Stan. "You're seein' things at night! What happenedon the Cobre Trail to stir up your superstitions?"
"Two gay young lads--punchers of Zurich's--tried to catch me with my gununloaded. That's what! And if herdin' with them blasted baa-sheep hadn'tjust about ruined your intellect, you'd know why, without asking," saidPete. "Look now! I was so sure that you was bein' systematicallyhornswoggled that, when two rank strangers made that sort of a ranikibooplay at me, I talked it out with myself, like this--not out loud--justme and Pete colloguing:
"'These gentlemen are pickin' on you, Pete. What's that for?' 'Why,'says Pete, 'that's because you're Stan's pardner, of course. These twoladdie-bucks are some small part of the gang, bunch, or congregationthat's been preyin' on Stan.' 'What they tryin' to put over on Stan now?'I asks, curiosity getting the better of my good manners. 'Not to pry intoprivate matters any,' says I, 'but this thing is getting personal. I canfeel malicious animal magnetism coursin' through every vein and leapin'from crag to crag,' says I. 'A joke's a joke, and I can take a joke aswell as any man; but when I'm sick in my bed, and the undertaker comes tomy house and looks into my window and says, "Darlin'! I am waitin' forthee!"--that's no joke. And if Stanley Mitchell's facetious friends beginany hilarity with me I'll transact negotiations with 'em--sure! So I putit up to you, Petey--square and aboveboard--what are they tryin' to workon Stan now?'
"'To get his mine, you idjit!' says Pete. 'Now be reasonable,' says I.'How'd they know we got any mine?' 'Didn't you tote a sample out of thatblisterin' old desert?' says Pete. 'We did,' I admits, 'just one littlechunk the size of a red apple--and it weighed near a couple of ton whilstwe was perishin' for water. But we stuck to it closer than a richbrother-in-law,' says I. 'You been had!' jeers Pete. 'What kind of talkis this? You caught that off o' Thorpe, over on the Malibu--you beenhad! Talk United States! Do you mean I've been bunked?' I spoke up sharp;but I was feelin' pretty sick, for I just remembered that we didn'tregister that sample when we mailed it to the assayer.
"'Your nugget's been seen, and sawed, and smeltered. Got that? As part ofthe skulduggery they been slippin' to young Stan, your package has beenopened,' says Petey, leerin' at me. 'Great Scott! Then they know we gotjust about the richest mine in Arizona!' I says, with my teeth chatterin'so that I stammers. 'Gosh, no! Else the coyotes would be pickin' yourbones,' says Pete. 'They know you've got some rich ore, but they figureit to be some narrow, pinchin', piddlin' little vein somewheres. How canthey guess you found a solid mountain of the stuff?'
"'Sufferin' cats!' says I. 'Then is every play I make--henceforth andforever, amen--to be gaumed up by a mess of hirelin' bandogs? Persecutin'Stan was all very well--but if they take to molesting me any, it'sgoing to make my blood fairly boil! Is some one going to draw down wagesfor makin' me mizzable all the rest of my whole life?' 'No such luck,'says Petey. 'Your little ore package was taken from the mail as part ofthe system of pesterin' Stanley--but, once the big boss-devil glued hisbug-eyes on that freeworkin' copper stuff, he throwed up his employerand his per diem, and is now operating roundabout on his own. They takeit you might have papers about you showing where your claim is--locationpapers, likely. That's all! These ducks, here, want to go through you.Nobody wants to kill you--not now. Not yet--any more than usual. But, ifyou ask me,' said Petey, 'if they ever come to know as much about thatcopper claim as you know, they'll do you up. Yes, sir! From ambush,likely. So long as they are dependin' on you to lead them to it, you'resafe from that much, maybe. After they find out where it is--_cuidado!_'
"'But who took that package out of the mail, Petey? It might have beenany one of several or more--old Zurich, here at Cobre; or the postmasterat Silverbell; or the postal clerks on the railroad; or the post-officepeople at El Paso.'
"'You're an old pig-headed fool,' says Pete to me; 'and you lie like athief. You know who it was, same as I do--old C. Mayer Zurich, grandchampion lightweight collar-and-elbow grafter and liar, cowman,grubstaker, general storekeeper, postmaster, and all-round crook, righthere in Cobre--right here where young Stanley's been gettin' 'em dealtfrom the bottom for three years. Them other post-office fellows never hadno truck with Stanley--never so much as heard of him. Zurich's here.He had the disposition, the motive, the opportunity, and the habit.Besides, he sold you a shoddy coat once. Forgotten that?'"
Pete paused to glower over that coat; and young Mitchell, big-eyed andgasping
, seized the chance to put in a word:
"You're an ingenious old nightmare, pardner--you almost make itconvincing. But Great Scott, man! Can't you see that your fine, plausibletheory is all built on surmise and wild conjecture? You haven't got a legto stand on--not one single fact!"
"Whilst I was first a-constructing this ingenious theory your objectionmight have carried force; for I didn't have a fact to stand on, as youobserve. I conjectured round pretty spry, too. Reckon it took me all ofhalf a second--while them two warriors was giving me the evil eye. I'lltell you how it was." He related the story of the shooting match and thelost bet. "And to this unprovoked design against an inoffensive strangerI fitted the only possible meaning and shape that would make a lick ofsense, dovetailin' in with the real honest-to-goodness facts I alreadyknew."
"But don't you see, old thing, you're still up in the air? Your theorydoesn't touch ground anywhere."
"Stanley--my poor deluded boy!--when I got to the railroad I wired thatassayer right off. Our samples never reached El Paso. So I wrote out myfake location and filed it. See what followed that filing--over yonder? Icome this way on purpose, expecting to see those fires, Stanley. If theyhadn't been there we'd have gone on to our mine. Now we'll go anywhereelse."
"Well, I'll just be teetotally damned!" Stanley remarked with greatfervor.
"Trickling into your thick skull, is it? Son, get a piece of charcoal.Now you make black marks on that white rock as I tell you, to holddown my statements so they don't flutter away with the wind. Ready?Number One: Our copper samples didn't reach the assayer--make a longblack mark ... Therefore--make a short black mark ... Number Two:Either Old Pete's crazy theory is correct in every particular--a longblack mark ... Or--now a short black mark ... Number Three: The assayerhas thrown us down--a long black mark ... Number Four: Which wouldbe just as bad--make a long black mark."