The 8th Western Novel

by Dean Owen

  “It’s sure good to be home, Goldie,” said Sandy. The mare whinnied. The bay nickered. Answers came back from the corral. Pronto, Sandy’s first string horse, came trotting cross the corral, head up.

  “Hello, you ol’ pie-eater!” said Sandy. “You sure look good to me. C’udn’t take you erlong this trip, son, but we’ll be out ter-morrer together.” Then he let out a mighty, “Hello, the house!”

  Sam’s lilt ceased abruptly. The riders came hurrying. Sam appeared, with Mormon waddling after, too swiftly for his best ease or grace of motion, both grabbing at Sandy, swatting him on the back as he off-saddled.

  “Lemme go,” said Sandy. “I’m hungry as a spring b’ar. Where’s Pedro? Pedro, I’m hungry—muy hambriento. Despachese Vd. Pronto! Huevos—seis huevos—fritos! Frijoles! Jamon! Cafe! Panecilos! Todo el rancho! Pronto!”

  “Si, señor, inmediatamente.” And, with a yell for Joe the half-breed, Pedro hurried away, grinning, to prepare the six fried eggs, the ham, the coffee, the muffins, everything in the larder!

  His two partners watched him eat, plying him with food and then with question after question about the trip, about Barbara Redding and about Molly’s going to school. Mormon made abject apology for talking too much and Sandy told how close a shave it had been.

  “I don’t cotton to playin’ jack-rabbit to Plimsoll and Jordan’s coyotes,” said Sandy. “Speshully Plimsoll, who’s at the bottom of the whole thing. Nex’ time he may not have the law backin’ him, an’ I won’t have to run. How’s the sheriff?”

  “Sort of tamed. They’ve been kiddin’ him a mite. Seems he done some boastin’ ’fore he started. His car’s laid up fo’ repairs. Jordan’s layin’ low. Miss Bailey, she’s at the head of the Wimmen’s League to gen’ally clean up politics an’ the town, one to the same time. I figger the first thing their broom’s goin’ to locate’ll be either Jordan or Plimsoll. They’re sure goin’ into all the dark corners an’ under the furniture. She’s a hustler an’ she’s thorough, is Mirandy Bailey.”

  “Where’d you learn all this, Mormon? Over to Herefo’d?”

  “’Pears Miss Bailey’s took a great interest—in Molly,” said Sam, with a grin. “She’s been over here twice to see if there was news. Mormon entertained her. He seems to be the fav’rite. Beats all how one man’ll charm the fair sect, like honey’ll bring flies, while another ain’t ever bothered.”

  Mormon changed the trend of the conversation by demanding to know about the school.

  “Molly’s got an outfit Barbara Redding bought her,” said Sandy. “Trunk an’ leather grip, all kinds of do-dads. School costs fifteen hundred bucks a year. The rest of Molly’s money is banked. Barbara picked out a school in Pennsylvania she said was the best. Here’s an advertisement of it.”

  He handed the magazine leaf to Sam who read over the items with Mormon looking over his shoulder, forming the words with his lips. Sam read:

  CORONA COLLEGE

  “Developing School for Girls. Development of well poised personality through intellectual, moral, social and physical trainin’.

  “Extensive Campus—(whatever that is)—Elective Academic—(Sufferin’ Cows!)—Domestic Science, Household Economics, Expression, Supervised Athletics.

  “Horseback Riding—(Huh, I never see an eastener yet who c’ud ride)—Swimming, basketball, country tramping, dancing, military drill.”

  Sam made heavy going of many of the words that left him in the dark as to their meaning. Sandy tried to elucidate, repeating the explanations Barbara Redding had given him.

  “Campus is the College Field, Sam,” he said.

  “Then why in time don’t they say so? Ain’t they goin’ to teach her to talk United States? I s’pose them things is all fine an’ necessary fo’ the female eddication but, dern me, if I can see where she’s goin’ to find time to eat an’ sleep.”

  “It’s been all-fired lonely with both you an’ her gone,” said Mormon. “An’ the dawg ain’t eat a mouthful, I don’t believe. Mebbe you can coax him, Sandy. Set around an’ howled like a sick coyote fo’ fo’-five days—mostly nights. If the gel balks at all that line of stuff I’ll stand back of her to quit an’ come back to Three Star.”

  “An’ have Jordan git her away an’ put her under Plimsoll’s guardeenship?”

  “He c’udn’t do that. Mirandy Bailey ’ud block him.”

  “He c’udn’t do anything,” said Sandy. “I got myse’f app’inted legal guardeen to Molly while we was in Santa Rosa, one day Barbara an’ Molly was shoppin’. John Redding’s lawyer fixed it up.”

  The months passed without especial incident at the Three Star. Sandy purchased a Champion Hereford bull for the herd out of the ranch share of the faro winnings. Other improvements were added, and the three partners seemed on the fair way to prosperity. Sandy’s theory that better bred and better fed beef, bringing better prices, would pay, began to demonstrate itself slowly, though it would take three years before the get of the thoroughbred stock was ready for marketing.

  Occasional letters came from Molly. Homesickness and unhappiness showed between the lines of the first epistles, despite her evident efforts to conceal them. Her ways were not the ways of the other girls who were developing a well poised personality through intellectual, moral, social and physical training. She apparently formed no friendships and it seemed that none were invited from her.

  “But I’m going to stick with it till I get same as the rest—on the outside, anyway,” she wrote. “I don’t know how some of them work inside. It ain’t like me. But I’ve started this and you-all want me to go through so I will, though I get lonesome as a sick cat for the ranch. I don’t swear any more—I got into awful trouble for spilling my language one time—and I can spell pretty good without hunting up every word in the dictionary. I reckon I’m a hard filly to break but then I was haltered late. I don’t think it would be allowed for me to have Grit, so you’ll have to look out for him and not let him forget me. I hope you won’t do that yourselves. Some of the other girls are nice enough. It will be all right soon as we get to understand each other. Don’t think I’m starting out to buck or that I’m unhappy, because I’m not.”

  “If she’s happy, I’m a Gila lizard,” said Mormon. “What’s the sense of havin’ her miserable fo’ the sake of a li’l’ book learnin’. She’s gettin’ to spell so I can’t make out what she’s writin’ about.”

  At last Molly wrote that she had made the basketball team and won honors and favors. She gained laurels for Corona in swimming and tennis, and life went more merrily. Mormon looked up tennis outfits in his mail catalogue and sent for a book on the game, which he soon abandoned.

  “You have to learn a foreign langwidge before you start to play,” he said. “Leastwise a code. The langwidge ain’t what you’d expect them to be handin’ out in a young lady’s college. All erbout deuce an’ love. I’d a notion we’d fix up the game fo’ her so she’d c’ud keep it up but I dunno. It sure ain’t a fat man’s game. It’s a human grasshopper’s.”

  CHAPTER XI

  PAY DIRT

  In September there was a killing in the Good Luck Pool Room, the murder of a stranger whose friends made such an investigation, backed by the real law-and-order element of Hereford, that the exposure brought about forfeiture of all licenses and a strict shutting down on gambling and illicit liquor. Plimsoll left Hereford for his horse ranch, deprived of the sheriff’s official countenance, and Jordan began to worry about election.

  One evening in early October a little body of riders came to the Three Star, all strangers to the county, men whose faces were grim, who cracked no jokes, whose greetings were barely more than civil. They were well armed and they acted like men of a single purpose.

  “This is the Three Star, ain’t it?” asked the leader of a cowboy, who nodded silently, taking in the appearance of the visitors.

  “Bourke, Peters and
Manning?”

  “One and all,” answered the Three Star rider. “Find ’em at chuck, I reckon. You-all are jest in time. If you aim to stay overnight I’ll tend yore hawsses an’ put ’em in the corral.”

  “You seem hospitable here.”

  The tone was half sarcastic.

  “Rule of the ranch,” replied Buck. “Folks arrivin’ after sun-down, the same bein’ strangers, is expected to pass the night, if they’re in no hurry.”

  Sandy personally backed the invitation a moment later and steaks were being pan-fried as the men dismounted and lounged on the porch, awaiting their meal. The leader introduced himself by the name of Bill Brandon, claiming previous knowledge, without actual acquaintance, of Sandy, Mormon and Sam in Texas. Sizing each other up, man-fashion, eye to eye, appraising a score of tiny things that aggregated sufficiently to tip the mental scale, the crowd grew more familiar and welded with supper, exchanged anecdotes with digestion, to get confidential over the tobacco.

  “We’re out after a man who’s been collectin’ hawsses too primiscuous,” said Brandon finally. “We know you gents by past reputation an’ by what they say of you in Herefo’d. Also, by that last reckonin’, I ain’t figgerin’ you as any speshul pal of the man we’re tryin’ to round up. I reckon you know who we mean. Jim Plimsoll, who owns what he calls the Waterline Hawss Ranch, sixteen miles east of you, more or less; an’ who gits more fancy breeds out of the mangy cayuses he shows his breedin’ mares an’ stallions, than there is different fish in the sea. From all I can figger most of his mares must have fo’ foals a year.

  “Some of us are from this state—Mojave County]two of us from Nevada. Me, I’m from California. We’ve all been losin’ hawsses off an’ on an’ we’ve final’ got together an’ compared notes. Seems most of the missin’ stock sorter drifted across the Arizony line somewheres between Mojave City an’ Topock. Most of ’em have been sold or passed on. All of ’em have been faked an’ doctored more or less. Talk points to Plimsoll, so do some facts, but not enough. An’ this Plimsoll has got some mighty close friends where they do the most good. You’d have to prove a damn sight more than we got to even sight a blank warrant.”

  “You been over to his ranch?” asked Sandy.

  “Jest come from there. He’s slick an’ cool, is Plimsoll. We was supposed to be lookin’ over hawsses for buyin’, but he’s careful who he sells to. We saw some. An’ we recognized some. But you know how it is, Bourke, it ain’t hard to change a hawss. Dock its foretop, do a little doctorin’, an’ how you goin’ to prove it? I’ll say this for the man, he’s the finest brand-faker I’ve met up with. He suspicioned what we was after an’ we didn’t see all he had. But we’re goin’ to git him yet an’, when we do, there won’t be any more hawss-stealin’ an’ fakin’ in Coconino County, Arizona. Hawss-stealin’ was a hangin’ matter when I first come west an’ I reckon there’s some feels the same way now. Speshully when the courts back up a man like Plimsoll. Lead’s cheaper than rope, but somehow it ain’t so convincin’.”

  Brandon changed the subject after he had spoken, but it was plain that he and his companions had not given up the matter; clear also that they were sure of Plimsoll’s guilt and laying plans to trap him. They stayed until the next morning and departed.

  “That man Brandon’s got some trick up his sleeve to trap Plimsoll,” said Sam, watching them ride off. “He ain’t quite got it fixed up yet to suit himself but it’s a good un.”

  “He’s got brains,” commented Sandy, rubbing Grit’s ears. The collie had picked up since Sandy’s return, sensing some connection with his mistress closer than that of Mormon and Sam. He would feed only from Sandy’s hand and attached himself to the latter almost as permanently as his shadow. “So has Jim Plimsoll. I ain’t hankerin’ fo’ another man to clean him up befo’ I get my own chance. But that bunch sure mean business.”

  The incident was forgotten as the round-up days grew near, with frosty mornings when the mountains looked as flat as if they had been profiled from cardboard and stuck up along the horizon—until the lifting sun modeled them with shadows—with sweltering noons tapering slowly off to cool nights while horses raced after the flying cattle, driving and cutting out, and so to the corral brandings, where the three partners found their increase better than they had anticipated.

  Molly was not to come home at Christmas after all. She formed a friendship, the first close one she had made, and Barbara Redding advised that the invitation extended by this new acquaintance to spend the holidays be accepted. There had been plans of a Christmas tree and a celebration, but the gifts were boxed and sent off. Others arrived from the East in exchange, a collar for Grit, a cigarette case for Sandy, a necktie for Mormon and a three-decked harmonica for Sam. There was a picture too, not so much of a girl but a young woman, a somewhat wistful look in her eyes, but a firm-lipped, resolute-chinned young woman for all that, who smiled out at them frankly and confidently. It was signed

  A Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year from the Mascotte of the * * *

  Molly.

  “I dunno about the merry Christmas,” said Mormon. “We’re prosperous enough, short of bein’ profiteers. Molly’s gettin’ to be a good-looker, ain’t she? Goin’ to git it framed, Sandy?”

  Snows fell, the temperature ranged down far below zero at times, winter gave reluctant place to spring until the last moment when it turned and fled and, far into the desert, myriads of flower-blooms sprang up overnight while everywhere the cactus gleamed in silken blooms in yellow and crimson.

  One April night the Bailey flivver came charging up to Three Star, smothering itself in a cloud of dust that had not settled before there sprang out of it Miranda Bailey and the lanky Ed, temporarily charged with a tremendous activity. The cause of young Ed’s galvanism was so strong that he actually won from his aunt as bearer of the news.

  “Gold!” he cried. “They’ve struck pay dirt at Dynamite! Chunks of sylvanite that sweat gold in the fire. Assay thirty thousand dollars a ton. Whole streaks of it. Vein’s twelve foot wide. The whole town’s stampedin’ by way of White Cliff Cañon. I’m goin’. Got a pick an’ shovel in the car. Aunt Mirandy, she was bound we’d come this way. Mebbe we can pack you all in. But you got to hurry or they’ll swarm over Dynamite like flies on a chunk o’ liver!”

  “It’s true,” backed Miss Bailey. “Folks over to Hereford have gone crazy. I caught a word or two that Plimsoll’s to the bottom of the rush. Ed heard he got hold of some samples them easterners took an’ had ’em sent away an’ assayed. They turned out to be the big stuff. ’Course you can’t depend on gossip, when folks are talkin’ mines but, if it’s so, Plimsoll’s burned the wind to git first pick. An’ he’ll grab those claims of Molly’s first thing. That’s one reason I made Ed come this way. Thought you might like to come erlong, on’y he took the words out of my mouth.”

  “You goin’?” asked Mormon. There were two red splotches in Miranda’s cheeks, a glitter in her eyes that suggested she had not escaped the gold fever.

  “Sure am,” she answered. “Ed Bailey Senior, he ’lows there’s no sense in chasin’ gold underground. Says he likes to see his prospects growin’ up under his own eyes an’ gazin’ on his own land. I’m the adventurous one of the Bailey fam’ly, though you mightn’t guess it to look at me,” she said with a twitch of her lips. “Me an’ young Ed here. He takes after me. Got the gamblin’ germ in our systems. Want to git somethin’ fo’ nothin’,” she went on with grim humor. “I reckon Ed’s right but, land-sake, doin’ the same thing, day in an’ out—gits mighty monotonous. Bein’ a woman, you’re more tied than a man. I tried to work my extry energy out in politics but it all come my way too easy.

  “Plimsoll ain’t got much love for me. He figgers I lost him his license an’ his brother-in-law sheriff his badge. He’s right. I did. I figgered you’d not be anxious to let him have his own way about Molly’s claims an’ I ’lowed I’d l
ike to be along an’ see the excitement. Me an’ Ed here’ll stake off suthin’ for ourselves. I’d jest as soon git some easy money as the rest of ’em. If I do I’ll buy another car. This thing”—she surveyed the panting flivver contemptuously—“is nigh worn out and it’s jest a tin kittle on wheels. Biles if you leave it out in the sun.”

  Sandy, after a swift word of apology, turned away toward the bunk-house. Mormon, with a sweeping salute from his bald head to his knees, voiced his opinion.

  “Marm,” he said, “you’re a dyed-in-the-wool sport an’ I’d admire to trail with you. But that kittle, as you call it, ’ll sure bu’st its cinches with we-all ridin’ it. I’m no jockeyweight, fo’ one.”

  “It’ll stand up. We’ve got to make time. I was wonderin’ if we c’ud make it by the old road, where you found Molly? It’s shorter than White Cliff Cañon an’ we’ve lost time comin’ out here.”

  Sam shook his head.

  “No’m, c’udn’t be done. There ain’t no road. Las’ winter ’ud finish what was left of it an’ there was spots this side of where we found Casey where a wagon c’udn’t have passed. We just made it with the buckbo’d. Ask Sandy.”

  Sandy, coming up, endorsed Sam.

  “We’ll have to go the long way,” he said. “How are you off fo’ grub? It’ll be sca’ce an’ high in Dynamite. Some of us may have to stay an’ hang on to claims until they’re recorded an’ the new camp settles down. An’ one of us sh’ud stay an’ run the ranch,” he added. At which his partners balked resolutely.

  “We’ve got some food,” said Miranda. “You might fetch along some canned stuff if you’ve any handy. Ed, you sure you got plenty ile, gas an’ water? Better look her all over.”

  With orders to Buck, with some provisions, ammunition and a few tools, the hurried start was made. Mormon clambered to the front seat beside young Ed, Miranda Bailey sat between Sandy and Sam. Whatever lack of energy the lank Ed Junior displayed on his feet, he eliminated as a driver. The springs creaked, chirpings arose from various parts of the car as it ran, but he coaxed the engine, performed miracles at bad places in the road, nursed the insufficient radiator surface and kept the “kittle” at a simmer.