Claim Number One

by Ogden, George W

  “Well!” said the toolmaker. “So our doctor is the winner! But it’s a marvel that the editor didn’t turn the paper over to say so. I never saw such a botch at writing news!”

  He did not know, any more than any of the thousands who read that ingenuous announcement, that Editor Mong was working his graft overtime. They did not know that he had entered into a conspiracy to deceive them before the drawing began, the clerk in charge of the stage-office and the one telephone of the place being in on the swindle.

  Mong knew that the Meander stage would leave for Comanche at eight in the morning, or two hours before the drawing began. It was the only means, exclusive of the telephone, by which news could travel that day between the two places, and as it could carry no news of the drawing his scheme was secure.

  Mong had feared that his extras might not move with the desired celerity during the entire day–in which expectation he was agreeably deceived–so he deliberately withheld the name of the winner of Number One, substituting for it in his first extra the name of the winner of Number Two. He believed that every person in Comanche would rush out of bed with two bits in hand for the extra making the correction, and his guess was good.

  Walker and Bentley hurried back to the Hotel Metropole to find that Sergeant Schaefer had arrived ahead of them with the news. They were all up in picturesque déshabillé, Horace with a blanket around him like a bald-headed brave, his bare feet showing beneath it. The camp was in a state of pleasurable excitement; but Dr. Slavens was not there to share it, nor to receive the congratulations which all were ready to offer with true sincerity.

  “I wonder where he is?” questioned Horace a little impatiently.

  He did not like to forego the ceremony, but he wanted to get back to bed, for a man’s legs soon begin to feel chilly in that mountain wind.

  “He left here not very long ago,” said Agnes; “perhaps not more than an hour. I was just preparing to go to bed.”

  “It’s a fine thing for him,” commented Sergeant Schaefer. “He can relinquish as soon as he gets his papers for ten or twelve thousand dollars. I understand the railroad’s willing to pay that.”

  “It’s nice and comfortable to have a millionaire in our midst,” said June. “Mother, you’d better set your cap for him.”

  “June Reed!” rebuked her mother sharply above the laughter which the proposal provoked.

  But under the hand of the night the widow blushed warmly, and with a little stirring of the treasured leaves of romance in her breast. She had thought of trying for the doctor, for she was only forty-seven, and hope lives in the female heart much longer than any such trifling term.

  They sat and talked over the change this belated news would make in the doctor’s fortunes, and the men smoked their pipes, and the miller’s wife suggested tea. But nobody wanted to kindle a fire, so she shivered a little and went off to bed.

  The night wore on, Comanche howling and fiddling as it never had howled and fiddled before. One by one the doctor’s friends tired of waiting for him and went to bed. Walker, William Bentley, and Agnes were the last of the guard; the hour was two o’clock in the morning.

  “I believe you’d just as well go to bed, Miss Horton,” suggested Bentley, “and save the pleasure of congratulating him until tomorrow. I can’t understand why he doesn’t come back.”

  “I didn’t know it was so late,” she excused, rising to act on his plainly sensible view of it.

  “Walker and I will skirmish around and see if we can find him,” said Bentley. “It’s more than likely that he’s run across some old friend and is sitting talking somewhere. You’ve no notion how time slips by in such a meeting.”

  “And perhaps he doesn’t know of his good fortune yet,” she suggested.

  “Oh, it’s all over town long ago,” Walker put in. “He knows all about it by this time.”

  “But it isn’t like him to keep away deliberately and shun sharing such good news with his friends,” she objected.

  “Not at all like him,” agreed Bentley; “and that’s what’s worrying me.”

  She watched them away until the gloom hid them; then went to her compartment in the tent, shut off from the others like it by gaily flowered calico, such as is used to cover the bed-comforts of the snoring proletariat. It was so thin that the light of a candle within revealed all to one without, or would have done so readily, if there had been any bold person on the pry.

  There she drew the blanket of her cot about her and sat in the dark awaiting the return of Bentley and Walker. There was no sleep in her eyes, for her mind was full of tumult and foreboding and dread lest something had befallen Dr. Slavens in the pitfalls of that gray city, the true terrors and viciousness of which she could only surmise.

  Bentley and Walker went their way in silence until they came to the lights. There was no thinning of the crowds yet, for the news in the midnight extra had given everybody a fresh excuse for celebrating, if not on their own accounts, then on account of their friends. Had not every holder of a number been set back one faint mark behind the line of his hopes?

  Very well. It was not a thing to laugh over, certainly, but it was not to be mended by groans. So, if men might neither groan nor laugh, they could drink. And liquor was becoming cheaper in Comanche. It was the last big night; it was a wake.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Walker, “I don’t think we’d better look for him too hard, for if we found him he wouldn’t be in any shape to take back there by now.”

  “You mean he’s celebrating his good luck?” asked Bentley.

  “Sure,” Walker replied. “Any man would. But I don’t see what he wanted to go off and souse up alone for when he might have had good company.”

  “I think you’ve guessed wrong, Walker,” said Bentley. “I never knew him to take a drink; I don’t believe he’d celebrate in that way.”

  Even if he had bowled up, protested Walker, there was no harm in it. Any man might do it, he might do it himself; in fact, he was pretty sure that he would do it, under such happy conditions, although he believed a man ought to have a friend or two along on such occasions.

  From place to place they threaded their way through the throng, which ran in back-currents and cross-currents, leaving behind it upon the bars and gaming-tables an alluvium of gold. Dr. Slavens was not at any of the tables; he was not reeling against any of the bars; nor was he to be seen anywhere in the sea of faces, mottled with shadows under the smoky lights.

  “Walker, I’m worried,” Bentley confessed as they stood outside the last and lowest place of diversion that remained to be visited in the town.

  “I tell you, it flies up and hits a man that way,” protested Walker. “Sheep-herders go that way all of a sudden after a year or two without a taste of booze, sometimes. He’ll turn up in a day or two, kind of mussed up and ashamed; but we’ll show him that it’s expected of a gentleman in this country once in a while, and make him feel at home.”

  “Yes, of course,” Bentley agreed, his mind not on the young man’s chatter nor his own reply. “Well, let’s run through this hole and have it over with.”

  Inside the door four dusty troopers, on detached duty from the military post beyond Meander, sat playing cards. As they appeared to be fairly sober, Walker approached them with inquiries.

  No, they hadn’t seen Dr. Slavens. Why? What had he done? Who wanted him?

  Explanations followed.

  “Well,” said a sergeant with service-stripes on his sleeve and a broad, blue scar across his cheek, “if I’d ’a’ drawed Number One you bet you wouldn’t have to be out lookin’ for me. I’d be up on the highest point in Comanche handin’ out drinks to all my friends. Ain’t seen him, pardner. He ain’t come in here in the last two hours, for we’ve been right here at this table longer than that.”

  They passed on, to look upon the drunken, noisy dance in progress beyond the canvas partition.

  “Not here,” said Walker. “But say! There’s a man over there that I know.”<
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  Bentley looked in that direction.

  “The one dancing with the big woman in red,” directed Walker.

  Bentley had only a glance at Walker’s friend, for the young man pulled his arm and hurried him out. Outside Walker seemed to breathe easier.

  “I’ll tell you,” he explained. “It’s this way: I didn’t suppose he’d want to be seen in there by anybody that knew him. You see, he’s the Governor’s son.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Bentley.

  “So if we happen to run across him tomorrow you’ll not mention it, will you?”

  “I’ll not be advertising it that I was in there in very big letters,” Bentley assured him.

  “A man does that kind of a thing once in a while,” said Walker. “It bears out what I was saying about the doctor. No matter how steady a man is, it flies up and hits him that way once in a while.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” yielded Bentley. “I think we’d just as well go to bed.”

  “Just as well,” Walker agreed.

  The chill of morning was in the air. As they went back the crowds had thinned to dregs, and the lights in many tents were out.

  “She thinks a lot of him, doesn’t she?” observed Walker reflectively.

  “Who?” asked Bentley, turning so quickly that it seemed as if he started.

  “Miss Horton,” Walker replied. “And there’s class to that girl, I’m here to tell you!”

  Agnes, in the darkness of her compartment, strained forward to catch the sound of the doctor’s voice when she heard them enter, and when she knew that he was not there a feeling which was half resentment, half accusation, rose within her. Was she to be disappointed in him at last? Had he no more strength in the happy light of his new fortune than to go out and “celebrate,” as she had heard the sergeant confidentially charging to Horace, like any low fellow in the sweating throng?

  But this thought she put away from her with humiliation and self-reproach, knowing, after the first flash of vexation, that it was unjust. Her fears rose towering and immense again; in the silence of the graying morning she shivered, drawing her cold feet up into the cot to listen and wait.

  Walker and Bentley had gone quietly to bed, and in the stillness around her there was an invitation to sleep. But for her there was no sleep in all that night’s allotment.

  The roof of the tent toward the east grew transparent against the sky. Soon the yellow gleam of the new sun struck it, giving her a sudden warm moment of hope.

  It is that way with us. When our dear one lies dying; when we have struggled through a night hideous with the phantoms of ruin and disgrace, then the dawn comes, and the sun. We lift our seamed faces to the bright sky and hope again. For if there is still harmony in the heavens, how can the discord of the earth overwhelm us? So we comfort our hearts, foolishly exalting our troubles to the plane of the eternal consonance.

  The sun stood “the height of a lance” when Agnes slipped quietly to the door of the tent. Over the gray desert lands a smoky mist lay low. Comanche, stirring from its dreams, was lighting its fires. Here passed one, the dregs of sleep upon him, shoulders bent, pail in hand, feet clinging heavily to the road, making toward the hydrant where the green oats sprang in the fecund soil. There, among the horses in the lot across the way, another growled hoarsely as he served the crowding animals their hay.

  Agnes looked over the sagging tent-roofs with their protruding stovepipes and wondered what would be revealed if all were swept suddenly away. She wondered what fears besides her own they covered, silent in the pure light of day. For Comanche was a place of secrets and deceits.

  She laid a fire in the tin stove and put the kettle on to boil. Horace Bentley and Milo Strong were stirring within the tent, making ready for the stage, which departed for Meander at eight.

  Mrs. Mann, the miller’s wife, came out softly, the mark of the comb in her hair, where it had become damp at the temples during her ablution. She looked about her swiftly as she stood a moment in the door, very trim and handsome in her close-fitting black dress, with a virginal touch of white collar and a coral pin.

  Agnes was bending over a bed of coals, which she was raking down to the front of the stove for the toast–a trick taught the ladies of the camp by Sergeant Schaefer–and did not seem to hear her.

  “Dr. Slavens hasn’t come back?” Mrs. Mann whispered, coming over softly to Agnes’ side.

  Agnes shook her head, turning her face a moment from the coals.

  “I heard you get up,” said Mrs. Mann, “and I hurried to join you. I know just how you feel!”

  With that the romantic little lady put an arm around Agnes’ neck and gave her a hurried kiss, for Horace was in the door. A tear which sprang suddenly leaped down Agnes’ face and hissed upon the coals before the girl could take her handkerchief from her sweater-pocket and stop its wilful dash. Under the pretext of shielding her face from the glow she dried those which might have followed it into the fire, and turned to Horace with a nod and smile.

  What was there, she asked herself, to be sitting there crying over, like a rough-knuckled housewife whose man has stayed out all night in his cups? If he wanted to stay away that way, let him stay! And then she recalled his hand fumbling at the inner pocket of his coat, and the picture post-card which he had handed her at the riverside.

  Still, it wasn’t a matter to cry about–not yet at least. She would permit no more disloyal thoughts. There was some grave trouble at the bottom of Dr. Slavens’ absence, and she declared to herself that she would turn Comanche over, like a stone in the meadow of which the philosopher wrote, and bare all its creeping secrets to the healthy sun, but that she would find him and clear away the unjust suspicions which she knew were growing ranker in that little colony hour by hour.

  They all gathered to bid Sergeant Schaefer good-bye, for he was to rejoin them no more. June pressed upon him a paper-bag of fudge, which she had prepared the day before as a surprise against this event. The sergeant stowed it away in the side pocket of his coat, blushing a great deal when he accepted it.

  There was a little sadness in their hearts at seeing the soldier go, for it foretold the dissolution of the pleasant party. And the gloom of Dr. Slavens’ absence was heavy over certain of them also, even though Sergeant Schaefer tried to make a joke of it the very last thing he said. They watched the warrior away toward the station, where the engine of his train was even then sending up its smoke. In a little while Horace and Milo followed him to take the stage.

  There came a moment after the men had departed when Agnes and William Bentley found themselves alone, the width of the trestle-supported table between them. She looked across at him with no attempt to veil the anxiety which had taken seat in her eyes. William Bentley nodded and smiled in his gentle, understanding way.

  “Something has happened to him,” she whispered, easing in the words the pent alarm of her breast.

  “But we’ll find him,” he comforted her. “Comanche can’t hide a man as big as Dr. Slavens very long.”

  “He’ll have to be in Meander day after tomorrow to file on his claim,” she said. “If we can’t find him in time, he’ll lose it.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE GOVERNOR’S SON

  After a conference with Walker in the middle of the morning, Bentley decided that it would be well to wait until afternoon before beginning anew their search for the doctor. In case he had been called in his professional capacity–for people were being born in Comanche, as elsewhere–it would be exceedingly embarrassing to him to have the authorities lay hands on him as an estray.

  “But his instrument-case is under his cot in the tent,” persisted Agnes, who was for immediate action.

  “He may have had an emergency call out of the crowd,” explained Bentley.

  In spite of his faith in the doctor, he was beginning to lean toward Walker’s view of it. Slavens was big enough to take care of himself, and experienced enough to keep his fingers out of other pe
ople’s porridge. Besides that, there had to be a motive behind crime, and he knew of none in the doctor’s case. He was not the kind of man that the sluggers and holdups of the place practiced upon, sober and straight as he always had been. Then it must be, argued Bentley, that the doctor had his own reason for remaining away. His unexpected luck might have unbalanced him and set him off on a celebration such as was common in such cases.

  “Very well,” agreed Agnes. “I’ll wait until noon, and then I’m going to the police.”

  Being a regularly incorporated city, Comanche had its police force. There were four patrolmen parading about in dusty déshabillé with prominent firearms appended, and a chief who presided over them in a little box-house, where he might be seen with his coat off and a diamond in the front of his white shirt, smoking cigars all day, his heels on the window-sill.

  As Dr. Slavens had not appeared at the time designated as her limit by Agnes, Bentley went with her to the chief’s office to place the matter before him. It was well that they did not go there for sympathy, and unfortunate that they expected help. The chief received them with disdainful aloofness which amounted almost to contempt. He seemed to regard their appeal to him for the elucidation of the doctor’s mystery as an affront.

  The chief was a short man, who vainly believed that he could sustain his trousers in dignified position about his hipless body with a belt. The result of this misplaced confidence was a gap between waistcoat and pantaloons, in which his white shirt appeared like a zebra’s stripe.

  He was a much-bedizened and garnitured man, for all that he lacked a coat to hang his ornaments upon. Stones of doubtful value and unmistakable size ornamented the rings upon his stocky fingers, and dangled in an elaborate “charm” upon the chain of his watch. The only name they ever addressed him by in Comanche other than his official title was Ten-Gallon. Whether this had its origin in his capacity, or his similarity of build to a keg, is not known, but he accepted it with complacency and answered to it with pride.