Wild Western Tales 2: 101 Classic Western Stories Vol. 2 (Civitas Library Classics)

by Various

  "Well," said Ajax, "you are teetotal yourself; you ought to respect a man who calls for lemonade."

  "I ain't a thief," said our neighbour. "If I was," he added, "I reckon I'd cover my tracks around saloons with a leetle whisky. Boys, there's another thing. This feller we're after is ridin' too fast. Them colts won't stand it. Young things must feed an' rest. The saloon-keeper allowed they were footsore a'ready, and kinder petered out. We must keep our eyes skinned."

  "You're a wonder," said Ajax. "How you divined that the thief would travel this trail beats me."

  "Wal," said old man Dumble, "it's this way. There's a big dealer comes three times a year to Bakersfield; he pays good money for good stuff-- an' he asks no questions. I happened to hear he was a-comin' down only las' Sunday."

  Something in his voice, some sly gleam in his eye, aroused my suspicions. As soon as we happened to be alone, I whispered to my brother: "I say, what if the old man is playing hare and hound with us?"

  "Pooh!" said Ajax. "He's keen as mustard to collar this thief--the keener, possibly, since he discovered that the fellow is a tenderfoot. I've sized him up about right. He wants to establish a record. It's like this teetotal business of his. The people here refuse to believe evil of a man who drinks water, goes to church, and catches horse- thieves. I'll add one word more. To give the old fraud his due, he really holds in abhorrence any crime that might land him in the State penitentiary. Hullo! There's a faint reek out yonder. I'll take a squint through my glasses."

  We called a halt. We were now on the alkaline plains beyond the San Emigdio mountains. Riding all through the night, we had changed horses at a ranch where we were known. Ajax stared through his binoculars.

  "What we're after," said he quietly, "is in sight."

  He handed his glasses to me. I could barely make out a horseman, herding along two animals. The plains were blazing with heat. In the distance a soft blue haze obscured the horizon; faintly outlined against this were three spirals of what seemed to be white smoke: three moving pillars of alkaline dust.

  "He can't git away from us," said old man Dumble.

  Looking at him, my suspicions took flight. He was, as Ajax said, keener than we to arrest the thief. His small eyes sparkled with excitement; his right index-finger was crooked, as if itching for the trigger; his lips moved. In fancy he was rehearsing the "Stand and deliver" of an officer of the law!

  "We kin ride him down," he muttered.

  "Yes," said Ajax.

  We looked to our girths and our pistols. It was unlikely that the thief would show fight, but--he might. Then we mounted, and galloped ahead.

  "Forrard--for-r-rard!" shouted Ajax.

  Within a few minutes, a quarter of an hour at most, the man we were hunting would see us; then the chase would really begin. He would abandon the footsore colts, and make for the hills. And so it came to pass. Presently, we saw the horseman turn off at right angles; the jaded colts hesitated, trotted a few yards, and stood still. A faint neigh floated down wind.

  "Doggone it!" exclaimed old man Dumble, "his horse is fresh. He's got friends in the hills."

  We had left the trail, and were pounding over the sage-brush desert. I could smell the sage, strongly pungent, and the alkaline dust began to irritate my throat; the sun, if one stood still, was strong enough to blister the skin of the hands.

  For three-quarters of an hour it seemed to me that the distance between us and our quarry remained constant; but Dumble said we were falling behind. The thief was lighter than any of us, and his horse was evidently a stayer. The hills rose out of the haze, bleak and bare, seamed with gulches, a safe sanctuary for all wild things.

  "If the cuss was within range, I'd try a shot," said the old man.

  "I'd like to make out who he is," said Ajax.

  Suddenly the horse of the thief fell. We discovered later that the beast had plunged into a piece of ground honeycombed with squirrel- holes. The man staggered to his feet; the horse struggled where he fell, but did not rise. His shoulder was broken.

  "We have him!" yelled Dumble.

  "Yes; we have him," repeated my brother. "Suppose we take a look at him?"

  The thief had abandoned all idea of escape. He stood beside his horse, waiting for us; but at the distance we could not determine whether he intended to surrender quietly or to fight. Ajax adjusted his glasses, and glanced through them. Then, with an exclamation, he handed them to me.

  "Kin ye make him out, boys?" asked our neighbour.

  "Yes," said I, giving back the glasses to Ajax. He handed them in silence to old man Dumble. Then, instinctively, both our right hands went to our belts. We were not quite sure what a father might do.

  He did what should have been expected--and avoided. He dropped the binoculars. Then he turned to us, trembling, livid--a scarecrow of the man we knew;

  "It's my boy," he said hoarsely. "And I thought he was the best boy in the county. Oh God!"

  A minute may have passed, not more. One guesses that in that brief time the unhappy father saw clearly the inevitable consequences of his own roguery and sharp practice. He had sowed, broadcast, innumerable, nameless little frauds; he reaped a big crime. I looked across those dreary alkaline plains and out of the lovely blue haze beyond I seemed to see the Dumbles' spring wagon rolling to church. Mrs. Dumble's pale, impassive face was turned to the bleak plains. At last I read her aright, that quiet woman of silence. She knew the father of her children from the outer rind to the inmost core. I thought of the pretty daughters, who did not know. And out yonder stood the son.

  Ajax beckoned me aside. We whispered together for a moment or two. Then my brother spoke--

  "We're going to lead home our colts," he said curtly; "and you can lead home yours. We shall take better care of ours after this experience. They won't be allowed to run wild in the back pasture."

  "Boys--Quincey an' me----"

  "Shush-h-h!" said Ajax. "That fellow out there is a long way off. I could not swear in a court of law that he is the person we take him to be. Whom he looks like we know, who he is we don't know, and we don't wish to know. So long."

  We rode back to our colts.

  Contents

  UNCLE JAP'S LILY

  By Horace Annesley Vachell

  Jaspar Panel owned a section of rough, hilly land to the north-east of Paradise. Everybody called him Uncle Jap. He was very tall, very thin, with a face burnt a brick red by exposure to sun and wind, and, born in Massachusetts, he had marched as a youth with Sherman to the sea. After the war he married, crossed the plains in a "prairie schooner," and, eventually, took up six hundred and forty acres of Government land in San Lorenzo County. With incredible labour, inspired and sustained by his natural acuteness, he wrought a miracle upon a singularly arid and sterile soil. I have been told that he was the first of the foothill settlers to irrigate abundantly, the first to plant out an orchard and vineyard, the first, certainly, to create a garden out of a sage-brush desert. Teamsters hauling wheat from the Carisa plains used to stop to shake the white alkaline dust from their overalls under Uncle Jap's fig trees. They and the cowboys were always made welcome. To such guests Uncle Jap would offer figs, water-melons, peaches, a square meal at noon, and exact nothing in return except appreciation. If a man failed to praise Uncle Jap's fruit or his wife's sweet pickles, he was not pressed to "call again." The old fellow was inordinately proud of his colts, his Poland-China pigs, his "graded" bull, his fountain in the garden.

  "Nice place you have, Mr. Panel," a stranger might say.

  "Yas; we call it Sunny Bushes. Uster be nothin' but sun an' bushes onst. It's nice, yas, and it's paid for."

  "What a good-looking mare!"

  "Yas; she's paid for, too."

  Everything on the ranch, animal, vegetable, and mineral, was "paid for." Uncle Jap was the last man to hurt anybody's feelings, but the "paid for" rankled on occasion, for some of his visitors stood perilously near the edge of bankruptcy, and, as a rule, had not paid for either the land they
occupied, or the cattle they branded, or the clothes they wore. To understand this story you must grasp the fact that Uncle Jap lived with credit and not on it.

  His wife, also of New England parentage, had a righteous horror of debt bred in her bone. Uncle Jap adored her. If he set an extravagant value upon his other possessions, what price above rubies did he place upon the meek, silent, angular woman, who had been his partner, companion, and friend for more than a quarter of a century. Sun and wind had burnt her face, also, to the exact tint of her husband's. Her name was Lily.

  "And, doggone it, she looks like a lily," Uncle Jap would say, in moments of expansion. "Tall an' slim, yas, an' with a little droop of her head. I'd ought ter be grateful to God fer givin' me sech a flower outer heaven--an' I am, I am. Look at her now! What a mover!"

  Uncle Jap's Lily chasing a hen certainly exhibited an activity surprising in one of her years. By a hairbreadth she missed perfection. Uncle Jap had been known to hint, nothing more, that he would have liked a dozen or so of babies. The hint took concrete form in: "I think a heap o' young things, colts, kittens, puppies--an' the like." Then he would sigh.

  We came to California in the eighties, and in '93, if my memory serves me, Uncle Jap discovered bituminous rock in a corner of his ranch. He became very excited over this find, and used to carry samples of ore in his pocket which he showed to the neighbours.

  "There's petroleum whar that ore is--sure. An' ef I could strike it, boys, why, why I'd jest hang my Lily with di'monds from her head to her feet, I would."

  This, mind you, was before the discovery of the now famous oil fields. Even in those early days experts were of opinion that oil might be found below the croppings of bituminous rock by any pioneer enterprising enough to bore for it.

  About this time we began to notice that Uncle Jap was losing interest in his ranch. Cattle strayed through the fence because he neglected to mend it, calves escaping were caught and branded by unscrupulous neighbours, a colt was found dead, cast in a deep gulch.

  "What's the matter with Uncle Jap?" we asked, at the May-Day picnic.

  Mrs. Fullalove, a friend of Mrs. Panel, answered the question.

  "I'll tell ye," she said sharply. "Jaspar Panel has gotten a disease common enough in Californy. He's sufferin' from a dose o' swelled head."

  Mrs. Panel sprang to her feet. Her face was scarlet; her pale eyes snapped; the nostrils of her thin nose were dilated.

  "Susan Jane Fullalove," she cried shrilly, "how dare you?"

  Mrs. Fullalove remained calm.

  "It's so, Lily. Yer so thin, I didn't see ye sittin' edgeways, but ye needn't to ramp an' roar. Yer ranch is flyin' to flinders because Mr. Panel's tuk a notion that it's a-floatin' on a lake of ile."

  "An' mebbe it is," replied Mrs. Panel, subsiding.

  Shortly afterwards we heard that Uncle Jap was frequenting saloons, hanging about the hotels in the county town, hunting, of course, for a capitalist who would bore for oil on shares, seeking the "angel" with the dollars who would transport him and his Lily into the empyrean of millionaires. When he confided as much to us, my brother Ajax remarked--

  "Hang it all, Uncle Jap, you've got all you want."

  "That's so. I hev. But Lily----Boys, I don't like ter give her away-- this is between me an' you--she's the finest in the land, ain't she? Yas. An' work? Great Minneapolis! Why, work come mighty near robbin' her of her looks. It did, fer a fact. An' now, she'd ought ter take things easy, an' hev a good time."

  "She does have a good time."

  "Ajax, yer talkin' through yer hat. What do you know of wimmenfolk? Not a derned thing. They're great at pretendin'. I dessay you, bein' a bachelor, think that my Lily kind o' wallers in washin' my ole duds, an' cookin' the beans and bacon when the thermometer's up to a hundred in the shade, and doin' chores around the hog pens an' chicken yards? Wal--she don't. She pretends, fer my sake, but bein' a lady born an' bred, her mind's naterally set on--silks an' satins, gems, a pianner-- an' statooary."

  "I can't believe it," said my brother. "Mrs. Panel has always seemed to me the most sensible woman----"

  "Lady, if you please."

  "I beg pardon--the most sensible lady of my acquaintance, and the most contented with the little home you've made for her."

  "She helped make it. O' course, it's nateral, you bein' so young an' innercent, that you should think you know more about Mis' Panel's inside than I do, but take it from me that she's pined in secret for what I'm a-goin' ter give her before I turn up my toes."

  With that he rode away on his old pinto horse, smiling softly and nodding his grizzled head.

  Later, he travelled to San Francisco, where he interviewed presidents of banks and other magnates. All and sundry were civil to Uncle Jap, but they refused to look for a needle in a haystack. Uncle Jap confessed, later, that he was beginning to get "cold feet," as he expressed it, when he happened to meet an out-of-elbows individual who claimed positively that he could discover water, gold, or oil, with no tools or instruments other than a hazel twig. Uncle Jap, who forgot to ask why this silver-tongued vagabond had failed to discover gold for himself, returned in triumph to his ranch, bringing with him the wizard, pledged to consecrate his gifts to the "locating" of the lake of oil. In return for his services Uncle Jap agreed to pay him fifty dollars a week, board and lodging included. When he told us of the bargain he had made, his face shone with satisfaction and confidence. He chuckled, as he added slyly--

  "I peeked in to some o' them high-toned joolery stores on Montgomery and Kearney Streets. Yas, I did. An' I priced what they call a ti- airy, sort o' di'mond crown. They run up into the thousands o' dollars. Think o' Mis' Panel in a ti-airy, boys; but shush-h-h- h! Not a word to her--eh?"

  We pledged ourselves to secrecy, but when Uncle Jap's back was turned, Ajax cursed the wizard as the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims cursed the jackdaw. When we saw Mrs. Panel, she seemed to be thinner and more angular, but her lips were firmly compressed, as if she feared that something better left unsaid might leak from them. An old sunbonnet flapped about her red, wrinkled face, her hands, red and wrinkled also, trembled when we inquired after the wizard and his works.

  "He's located the lake," she replied. Suppressed wrath boiled over, as she added fiercely: "I wish 'twas a lake o' fire an' brimstone, an' him a-bilin' in the middle of it." Then, reading the sympathy in our eyes, she continued quickly: "I ain't denyin' that Jaspar has a right to do what he pleases with what lies out o' doors. He never interfered with me in my kitchen, never! Would you gen'lemen fancy a glass o' lemonade? No? Wal--I'm glad you called in, fer I hev been feelin' kind o' lonesome lately."

  What Uncle Jap's Lily suffered when he mortgaged all his cattle to sink a well nobody knows but herself, and she never told. The wizard indicated a certain spot below the croppings of bituminous rock; a big derrick was built; iron casing was hauled over the Coast Range; the well was bored.

  Then, after boring some two thousand feet, operations had to be suspended, because Uncle Jap's dollars were exhausted, and his patience. The wizard swore stoutly that the lake was there, millions and millions of barrels of oil, but he deemed it expedient to leave the country in a hurry, because Uncle Jap intimated to him in the most convincing manner that there was not room in it for so colossal a fraud. The wizard might have argued the question, but the sight of Uncle Jap's old Navy six-shooter seemed to paralyse his tongue.

  After this incident Uncle Jap ranched with feverish energy, and Mrs. Fullalove said that the old man had gotten over a real bad dose of swelled head.

  * * * * *

  Five years later came the oil boom!

  Everybody knows now that it flowed in prodigious quantities into the vats of one man, whom we shall speak of with the respect which the billionaire inspires, as the Autocrat of Petroleum. Let us hasten to add that we shall approach him in the person of his agent, who, so far as Uncle Jap was concerned, doubtless acted in defiance of the will of the greatest church builder and philanthropist in th
e world.

  Oil was struck in pints, quarts, gallons, buckets, and finally in thousands and tens of thousands of barrels! It flowed copiously in our cow-county; it greased, so to speak, the wheels--and how ramshackle some of them were!--of a score of enterprises, it saturated all things and persons.

  Now, conceive, if you can, the triumphant I-told-you-so-boys expression of Uncle Jap. He swelled again visibly: head first, then body and soul. The county kowtowed to him. Speculators tried to buy his ranch, entreated him to name a price.

  "I'll take half a million dollars, in cold cash," said Uncle Jap.

  The speculators offered him instead champagne and fat cigars. Uncle Jap refused both. He was not going to be "flimflammed," no, sir! Not twice in his life, no, Siree Bob! He, by the Jumping Frog of Calaveras, proposed to paddle his own canoe into and over the lake of oil. If the boys wished him to forgo the delights of that voyage, let 'em pungle up half a million--or get.

  They got.

  Presently, after due consultation with a famous mining engineer, Uncle Jap mortgaged his cattle for the second time, and sank another well. He discovered oil sand, not a lake. Then he mortgaged his land, every stick and stone on it, and sunk three more wells. It was a case of Bernard Palissy. Was Bernard a married man? I forget. If so, did he consult his wife before he burnt the one and only bed? Did she protest? It is a fact that Uncle Jap's Lily did not protest. She looked on, the picture of misery, and her mouth was a thin line of silence across her wrinkled impassive countenance.

  When every available cent had been raised and sunk, the oil spouted out. Who looked at the fountain in the patch of lawn by the old fig trees? Possibly Mrs. Panel. Not Uncle Jap. He, the most temperate of men, became furiously drunk on petroleum. He exuded it from every pore. Of course he was acclaimed by the county and the State (the Sunday editions published his portrait) as the star-spangled epitome of Yankee grit and get-there.

  At this point we must present, with apologies, the agent of the Autocrat, the agent, the High-muck-a-muck of the Pacific Slope, with a salary of a hundred thousand a year and perks! In his youth Nat Levi smelt of fried fish, unless the smell was overpowered by onions, and he changed his lodgings more often than he changed his linen. Now you meet him as Nathaniel Leveson, Esquire, who travelled in his private car, who assumed the God, when the God was elsewhere, who owned a palace on Nob Hill, and some of the worst, and therefore the most paying, rookeries in Chinatown, who never refused to give a cheque for charitable purposes when it was demanded in a becomingly public manner, who, like the Autocrat, had endowed Christian Churches, and had successfully eliminated out of his life everything which smacked of the Ghetto, except his nose.