CHAPTER XVIII
SPIES
Smith, the shaggy, mouse-coloured burro, lifted his voice in thatsobbing wail of welcome which has caused his kind to be designated asdesert canaries, as Oliver rode into the pasture. Smith's was agregarious soul. To be left entirely alone was torture. His ears weretwelve inches long, and the protuberances over his eyes were so craggythat Oliver had hesitated between the names of Smith and William CullenBryant. On the whole, though, "Smith" had seemed more companionable.
Oliver loosed Poche to console the lonesome heart of Smith and went atthe irrigating of his garden. When a stream of water was trickling alongevery hoed furrow he put on heavy hobnailed laced-boots and went intothe hills in search of his third bee tree.
It seems illogical to set down that one could live for nearly two monthson forty acres of land without having explored every square foot of it.But Oliver had not trod upon at least two thirds of his property. Lockedchaparral presents many difficulties. Farmers detest it, and artists gowild over it. But farmers are obliged to sprawl flat and crawl throughit occasionally, while artists sit on their stools at a distance from itthat brings out all the alluring browns and yellows and greens andolives of which it is capable under the magic of the changing sunlight.
Oliver had seen bees darting like arrows from the flowers in thecreekbed in a westerly direction, up over the thickest of the chaparral.Up there somewhere was another colony of winged misers and their hoardedwealth of honey. Honey was bringing a good price just then, and amerchant at Halfmoon Flat would buy it. So now the beeman climbed thehill and crawled into the chaparral in the direction the insects hadflown.
Scattered here and there through the dense thicket were pines and spruceand black oak. In one of these trees the bees must have their home; andhis task of finding it was not entirely a haphazard quest. When hecrawled to an opening in the bushes he would climb into the crotch ofone of them and locate the nearest tree. Then, flattening himself oncemore, he would crawl to this tree and look for a hollow for the bees.Finding none, he would locate another tree and crawl to it.
Thus wearisomely engaged he crawled into a depression three feet deep inthe earth beneath him. This allowed him to sit erect for the first timein minutes, and he availed himself of the chance, industriously moppinghis brow.
Now, Oliver Drew was not a miner, but he was a son of the outdoor Westand knew at once that he was seated in an ancient prospect hole. Aboutthe excavation were piled the dirt and stones that had been shovelledout.
He speculated over it. For all he knew, it might date back to thefascinating days of '49. A great forest of pines might have stood herethen. Or maybe the pines had been burned away, and a forest of giganticoaks had followed the conifers, to rear themselves majestically abovethe pigmies that delved, oftimes impotently, for the glittering yellowtreasure at their roots. Or, again, the prospect hole might have beendug years later, after the oaks had disappeared and the chaparral hadclaimed the land. There was no way of telling, for every decade or soforest fires swept the country almost clean, and some new growthsuperseded the old in Nature's endless cycle.
Fifty feet farther on he plopped into a second prospect hole, and alittle beyond that he found a third.
He noted now that in all cases no chaparral grew up through the muckthat had been thrown out. This would seem to signify that the work hadbeen done in recent years, while the bushes that now claimed the landstill grew there. He found a fourth hole soon, and near it weremanzanita stumps, the tops of which had been cut off with an ax.
This settled it. While the soil might show evidences of the work of manfor an interminable length of time, the roots of the lopped-offmanzanitas would rot in a decade, perhaps, and freezing weather wouldloosen the stumps from their moorings. But this wood was still sound.The prospecting had been done not many years before. And who had beenprospecting thus on patented land?
When he had wormed his way to the crest of a hill he had passed abouttwenty of these shallow holes. Now, at the top, the earth had beenliterally gophered. The workings here looked newer still; and presentlyhe came upon evidence that proved work had been done not longer than ayear before, for dry leaves still clung to the tops of manzanita bushesthat had been chopped off and pitched to one side.
It has been stated that he was not a miner. Still, having been born andraised in a mining country, he knew something of the geologicalformations in which gold ordinarily is found. He was in a gold producingcountry now, yet the specimens that he picked up near the prospect holesproved that only a rank tenderfoot would have searched so persistentlyin this locality.
He picked up a bit of white substance and gave it study. It resembledlithia. The water of his spring contained a trace of lithium salts,according to the analysis furnished him by the State AgriculturalCollege, to which he had mailed a sample. He pocketed the specimen forfuture reference.
As he sat on the edge of this hole, with his feet in it, he heard arustling in the bushes close at hand. At first he thought it might becaused by a jackrabbit; but soon it became certain that some heavier,larger body was making its way slowly through the chaparral.
A coyote? A bobcat? A deer?
He carried no gun today, and the swift thought of a mountain lion was abit unpleasant.
He quickly slid from his seat and stretched himself on the ground in theshallow excavation. Oliver was an ardent student of nature, and he likednothing better than secretly to watch some wild thing as it moved aboutit its customary routine, unconscious of the gaze of human eyes. Once hehad hidden in wild grapevines and watched a skunk searching for bugsalong a creekbed, until suddenly the moist bank crumbled beneath him,and he fell, and--But what followed is what might be called an unsavorystory.
The crackling, scraping sounds drew nearer, but whatever was making themwas not moving directly toward him. They ceased abruptly, and then heknew that the man or animal had reached the open space in the brush inwhich the prospect holes were situated.
As the noises were not continued, he began raising himself slowly, untilhe was able to look over the edge of the hole.
It was not a browsing deer nor a hunting coyote upon which he gazed. Asquat, dark man, with chaps and spurs and Stetson, was making his wayacross the open space to the continuation of the chaparral beyond it.His eyes were mere slits, black, Mongolic.
He was Digger Foss, the half-white, right-hand man of Adam Selden.
The progress of the gunman was not stealthy, for undoubtedly heconsidered himself particularly safe from observation up here in thewilderness of chaparral. He slouched bow-leggedly across the break inthe thicket, and dropped to hands and knees when he reached the edge ofit. He disappeared in the chaparral.
The general direction that he was pursuing was straight toward Oliver'scabin. Oliver lay quite still and listened to the renewed sounds of hisprogress through the prickly bushes.
Then once more they stopped suddenly. Oliver knew that in the shortspace of time elapsed Digger Foss could not have crawled beyond thereach of his hearing. He had paused again.
For perhaps five minutes he listened, but could hear no further sounds.Then from not far distant there came the familiar clatter of a dry pinecone in the manzanita tops.
A moment more and Oliver was smiling grimly. For Foss had suddenlyappeared above the tops of the chaparral. He was climbing a giant diggerpine, which only a short time before Oliver had investigated as thepossible home of the bees he was striving to find. There in plain sightthe halfbreed was climbing like a bear from limb to limb, keeping thetrunk of the tree between his chunky body and the cabin in the valley.
Presently he settled astride a horizontal bough on Oliver's side, hisback toward the watcher. He adjusted himself as comfortably as possible,and then there appeared in his hands a pair of binoculars. Leaningaround the tree trunk, screened by the digger pine's long,smoke-coloured needles, he focused the glasses on the cabin down below.
It looked to Oliver Drew as if this were not the first time that thegunman
had perched himself up there to watch proceedings in the canyon.There had been no hesitancy in his selection of a tree which stood insuch a position that other trees would not obstruct his view from itsbranches, no studying over which limb he might occupy to the bestadvantage.
Vaguely Oliver wondered how many times he had laboured and moved aboutdown below, with the keen, black, Chinese eyes fixed on him. It was nota comfortable feeling, by any means.
Now, though, his thoughts were taken up by the problem of getting awayunobserved by the spyglass man. Digger Foss was not a hundred feet fromwhere Oliver lay and watched him. If he should turn for an instant hewould see Oliver there, flat on his face in the excavation, for thehalfbreed's perch was twenty feet above the tops of the chaparral.
Oliver had decided to make a try at crawling on up the hill asnoiselessly as possible, when new and far slighter sounds came to hisears. So slight they were indeed that, if he had not been close to theearth, he might not have detected them at all.
But no bird or small animal could be responsible for them, for they werecontinuous and dragging. Once again he hugged the ground while hewatched and waited.
The sounds came on--sounds that seemed to be the result of some one'sdragging something carefully over the shattered leaves on the ground.And presently there hove into view another human being.
He was an Indian--a Showut Poche-daka. Oliver remembered his swarthyface, his inscrutable eyes. He had been pointed out to him at the fiestaby Jessamy as the champion trailer of all the Paubas, of which theShowut Poche-daka Tribe was a sort of branch. Often, Jessamy had said,this Indian, who was known by the odd and laughable name of Tommy My-Ma,had been employed by the sheriff of the county in tracking down escapedprisoners or fleeing transgressors against the law.
He wore no hat. He was barefooted. His only covering seemed to be a pairof faded-blue overalls and a colourless flannel shirt. Neither did hecarry any weapon, so far as Oliver could see.
His progress was now soundless as he came from the chaparral, flat onhis belly, wriggling along like a lizard with surprising speed. Hisblack, glittering eyes were unquestionably fixed with rapt intentness onthe man aloft in the digger pine; and by reason of this alone he did notsee Oliver Drew.
His movements commenced to be extraordinary. He wriggled himselfspeedily over the unlittered earth and made no sound. There was a pileof dry brush at one edge of the clearing, the tops of the bushes thathad been cut off to facilitate the sinking of the prospect holes. Towardthis Tommy My-Ma glided; and when he reached it he passed out of sighton the other side.
Then suddenly he reappeared again. Instantly he lowered his head to theground at the edge of the pile of brush; then swiftly the head andshoulders disappeared, the trunk and legs following. For a second Oliversaw the bare brown feet, then they too went out of sight.
Oliver understood the disappearing act of Tommy My-Ma, he thought. Thepile of brush covered another of the prospect holes, and into the holethe Showut Poche-daka had snaked himself. It seemed that he too hadsought a hiding place often frequented. In there he perhaps could siterect and, screened by the pile of brush, would be entirely hidden,while he himself could watch the spy in the branches of the digger pine.For that he was in turn spying on the man who was watching Oliver'scabin Oliver did not for a moment doubt.
But why? That was another matter!
He was quite aware of his own unprotected position; and with Tommy My-Manow hidden in the brush scarce fifty feet away from him, he dared notget out of his hole and try to crawl away.
The situation struck him as ridiculous in the extreme. Foss trying tospy on him; Tommy My-Ma spying on Foss--the object of all this intrigue,Oliver himself, spying on both of them!
And how long must it continue?
The only sounds now were the soft moaning of the wind through theneedles of the pines, and from afar, occasionally, the clear, cool callof a valley quail: "Cut that out! Cut that out!" The sun was hot on theresinous needles of the pines, and the smell of them filled the air.