The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  Now, Jeff knew that Warbuck was a hog for wealth and power and influence. All those came from the yellow stuff. Granted that Warbuck knew where there was a gold mine, why did he hold his hand? Why wasn’t he already grabbing the thing?

  That puzzled him; he got to thinking of it day and night, striving for the explanation.

  “It’s because he can’t, not because he doesn’t want to. There’s something in his way, something stopping him, making him wait.”

  Then it dawned on him; at least an explanation offered itself which seemed water tight: The gold was on some other man’s land, on the property of some rancher, perhaps, who owned all mineral rights. On the land of one of the ranchers whose mortgage he had acquired on taking over the Pioneer City Bank? Likely enough; more than likely.

  “Why, it might even be on my place!” But then he shook his head; old Charlie would have come to him with the news instead of to Bud King. Further, Warbuck had offered to tear up Jeff’s mortgage if Jeff would go on his pay roll. “And what did he think I could do for him?”

  Thinking all these things over he rode late one afternoon down to Halcyon for a talk with Still Jeff and Bill Morgan. As the long shadows stole across luxuriant Deer Valley he saw from the slopes the little white schoolhouse looking like a doll’s house, and remembered Chrystine Ward. He hadn’t seen Chrystine since the night of the dance; he really had meant to drop in on her when passing some time but his thoughts had not been the sort to lead a man to dallying, even in pleasant places. “Warbuck got her her job,” he pondered. “Wonder how long he’s known her.”

  It was already deep dusk when he came to Witch Woman’s Hollow; he saw a glint of light through the laurels where a window let the gleam of her lamp shine through. Strange old crone, living way out here all alone warped and wicked and, so they said, a miser.

  By the time he came to the ragged outer fringe of the dead town it was dark, and the long-deserted hotel on its gentle knoll smothered in black pines was an eerie, ghostly place. A faint evening breeze blew, and muffled weird sounds came from the old building; though its once green, now brown-streaked and spotted window shutters were up, in place as they had been and unmolested for years, the wind got in through a thousand cracks; there was rustling and scraping as though loosened wall-paper was set stirring by the draft, as though an old newspaper were being scratched about by rats; there was a faint creaking sound as though this monument to utter abandonment complained at being so heartlessly turned over to loneliness when in its youth it had been so gay and hospitable and friendly; half-heard thumping sounds might have been anything, bats bumping about or aimless men or blind men walking erratically.

  “Haunted,” said Jeff and, under the spell of the place, half-way meant it. “Why not? It’s sure got a right to its ghosts if any house ever had.”

  There was something to be said for his contention. The spectral old Pay Dirt Hotel had known less than five years of life altogether, but those had been hectic, colorful years stitched with gold and trimmed in red. The long mahogany bar that had come around the Horn to be installed here in the wilderness still had its scars, some only deep burns from cigar butts, some splintered gouges where wild pistol shots had had their way. At least half a dozen babies had been born here, more men than that had died violently, women of many kinds had had their sway, some few of them the fine, somehow delicate yet valiant and unconquerable pioneer women who bequeathed a staunch courage to the coming generation, some many of them light will-o’-the-wisps, some rather splendid adventuresses who left their mark deathlessly in the West, whose names are yet remembered. There were girls like Irene Gaylord. Bart Warbuck had married her and now she was Mrs. Bart Warbuck who disported herself like some grand duchess of the backwoods.

  Jeff paused a moment, then rode on, winding his way among other hushed abandoned houses, in and out among the young trees and encroaching brush, and so came presently to Still Jeff’s cabin. The door was shut but a lamp was burning; he found Still Jeff pottering about in a pair of thick red woolen socks and singing raucously one of those old Western ballads which never should have been written—But then, maybe they never were written, just passed along from one to another of the old reprobates—a ditty beginning, “My name is John Taylor,” and in its sentiments rapidly going from bad to worse.

  “How about letting me have some money, Jeff?” said Young Jeff, getting the door shut behind him.

  Still Jeff cocked up his shaggy brows which became question marks, asking merely, “How much?”

  “Ten thousand,” said Young Jeff, eyeing the old man shrewdly. “Warbuck now holds the mortgage on Los Robles and is set on squeezing.”

  Still Jeff struggled with the drawer in a warped and amazingly stained old pine table, and dug out a check book; there were a few drops of ink left in the bottom of a squatty earthen bottle which might have been there, and probably had, since Halcyon came into being.

  “I don’t want your damn money,” grunted Jeff. So Still Jeff shoved the table drawer back and let it go that way. “I was just wondering if you really did have a few beans left,” his son went on, and sat down on a rawhide-bottomed chair. “Why in blue blazes,” he wanted to know, “with all kinds of money do you squat here like—like an old boar in a sty?” Still Jeff’s brows hadn’t come down yet; now however they rose a notch higher as much as if to say, “Sty, hell. What’s the matter with this place?”

  “If I hadn’t seen you with my own eyes I wouldn’t believe you were real,” snorted Young Jeff.

  “Howdy, Boy,” said old Jeff as though Young Jeff had just now come in. He sat down at ease in a big ragged leather chair which had once decorated the lobby of the Pay Dirt Hotel, extended his long legs and rubbed his red-socked feet together like a huge grasshopper. He hadn’t shaved for days; his beard was as spotted as a leopard’s hide with brown and black and grizzly white predominating; his gnarled, walnut-hued hands looked as though all day he had been at play making mud pies. (“Grubbing around in some damned prospect hole,” thought Young Jeff. As though old Jeff needed any more gold than he already had! And though he’d ever chance on another strike—like that first and only one which gave Halcyon its birth certificate.)

  “Here’s how things stack up, Jeff,” Young Jeff began and to an attentive listener he opened up the vein of his own recent conjectures. Still Jeff nodded a time or two and twice scratched his ear and once got up to trim the lamp wick.

  “Supper’ll be ready in two shakes, Jeff,” he said at the end. “Better stick around.”

  But Young Jeff whacked him on the high, bony shoulder and went on his way, straight across the Square and to Red Shirt Bill Morgan’s cabin. Old Bill, too, was walking up and down like a caged tiger; his hands had just been scrubbed, but his lopsided boots were caked with fresh mud.

  “Still hunting gold, Bill?” Jeff asked.

  “Never hunted anything else,” snorted old Bill. “What else is there worth huntin’? Go on an’ tell me.”

  “Haven’t you got money enough already, Bill? It must cost you about three dollars a month to live.”

  “No man’s got money enough. Don’t be a seed tick all your life.”

  “Why didn’t you buy up the Pioneer Bank?”

  “Never knew Melvin was sellin’ out. Might of.”

  “When he sold to Warbuck—”

  “Melvin’s a louse,” said old Bill.

  “Lend me ten thousand dollars, Bill?”

  “What for? Hell, I know. To hand Warbuck so’s he won’t steal your ranch. Sure, I will, Kid. Only,” and old Bill looked foxy, “I’ll take the mortgage over as security, and—”

  Jeff laughed at him. “I don’t want your money, Bill, and you ought to know it. Just wanted to know if you had any left. Your overhead here must be pretty high, you know with this big place to keep up and all the servants and—”

  “I hope you laugh yourse’f to death some day,
Hyena,” said Bill Morgan.

  “Tell me, Bill, why Warbuck, if it was Warbuck and not just Jim-Ogden playing a lone hand, burned old Charlie down—unless it was because he knew Charlie had got his pick into high-grade, and unless he knew where the high-grade lay.”

  “I been thinkin’ about that,” said Red Shirt Bill, and reached for a most convenient, fat-bellied bottle. “Drink?” Jeff shook his head and Bill said, “That’s good,” and drank for both. Then he sat down and delved deep into his whiskers, hunting his chin. “Warbuck was over here today, Kid. Talkin’ to me, invitin’ me to sell out all my int’rests in an’ about Pay Dirt.”

  “Seeing you and anybody else, Bill?”

  “I reckon he saw any other folks that happened to be livin’ in Pay Dirt at the time; dunno.”

  “He’s tried to buy you out before. It’s nothing new.”

  “He’s tried for three years now. Wants to build a darn, sez he.” Bill made pretense of laughter. “Sez as how he means to compound the waters which flow, to stack up Wanderin’ River from hither to yon, to make this end of Deer Valley into the damndest dam any damn man ever heard about, to start in irrigatin’ a hundred thousan’ acres of the sand bottom.” He found his hidden chin and massaged it. “He’s a damn liar, is Bart Warbuck, and always was.”

  “That dam of his would put all Halcyon deep under water, wouldn’t it?”

  “So he says,” snorted Red Shirt Bill.

  “And you told him—”

  “I sorta reached out for my rifle and he went home,” chuckled old Bill.

  Jeff looked at him curiously. “You wouldn’t sell your share of Halcyon for anything on earth, would you, Bill?”

  “I’d buy the rest of Pay Dirt in,” said Bill Morgan through his teeth, “if the other owner wasn’t such a damn—” He stopped short. Never in his life had he said an outright word to Young Jeff against old Jeff.

  They talked for an hour. To Bill as to his father, Young Jeff told all that he knew of recent events, coming to these two old timers whom, both of them in their different ways, he held to be plain men of straight wisdom. Old Bill talked profanely for half of that hour, giving his views so freely that they were like runaway teams running downhill. They were shrewd views, too; Jeff seemed to hear a lustily swung hammer hitting many a nail square on the head. “There’s a woman in Bart Warbuck’s life,” said old Bill suddenly out of one of their few brief silences.

  “I know,” muttered Jeff. “She—” Then he stopped and asked, “Who, Bill? What woman?”

  “A pretty lady that lives not far from here,” said Red Shirt Bill. “She’s got three-four yeller teeth left, and the start of a right pert mustache, and she abides over in Witch Woman’s Hollow. Mebbe you’ve heard of old lady Grayle? Her.”

  Jeff got his thoughts in order. Warbuck and the old Witch?

  “How come?” he wanted to know. “What’s up?”

  “Cripes, I’d like to know! This makes the third time in the last six months I’ve caught him sneakin’ over to powwow with old Lady MacBeth. After the first time, I don’t mind tellin’, I sorta watched for the other two. Mebbe he comes over to get advice on how to kill folks at long range with spells and black magic?—Goin’ already, Hop Toad?”

  Jeff rode homeward slowly until again he came abreast of the old abandoned hotel. Downstairs it had a wide porch on three sides; from its southeastern corner you could see dimly through the trees the scarred side of Monument Mountain where the old crumbling shaft of the Gay Girl Mine was now only like a deeply thumbed imprint made by old Father Time. The rock-and-brick edifice boasted a second story and had up there a second porch, a warped and rotting balcony which had once been the meeting place of the haut ton of Halcyon. Now it was profusely decorated, under the sagging shed roof more or less sheltering it, with yellow jackets’ nests.

  The night breeze had stiffened into a stiff little whispering wind, clean and pleasantly sharp and garrulous with such gossip as it had picked up on its lively way. There was the rustle as of old papers stirring, the hushed thumping noises, a muted metallic sound as of an old sheet of tin, loose at one end and flapping.

  “Haunted,” thought Jeff again, and was riding on by, when something which ordinarily would have been of the importance of a falling leaf from a wind-shaken tree stopped him. It was only a gleam of light splitting the darkness for a mere fraction of a second, gone instantly. Its only significance lay in the fact that it came from the old, so long deserted Pay Dirt Hotel.

  It startled him; it started him puzzling; it had scarcely been blotted out by the thick velvet dark, seeming smothered in the oppressive silence, when he began asking himself all sorts of questions which ended by pricking him like goads. To the best of his knowledge there hadn’t been a lamp or candle lighted in the Pay Dirt for a good twenty-five or thirty years. Why should there be?

  He was tired of asking questions that went without answers. Here was one that he might answer for himself. He slipped promptly out of the saddle, tied his horse in the heart of a thick clump of young cedars and moved swiftly and silently toward the husk of the old Pay Dirt Hotel. He knew where he might find entrance with no trouble; a warped back door on dragging hinges had afforded him entrance before, though not for years. As a breathless, adventurous boy, not knowing what adventure he hoped for, he had gone in that way more than once.

  There was no second gleam of light and the whole place was enfolded in a grave-yard silence. He squeezed through the dilapidated door. Hardly across the threshold, as still as any night marauder, he stopped to listen. The silence was almost a palpable thing, pressing against his ear-drums. He took a step forward, groping with a darkness as thick as though it were shrouded in black velvet curtains; he took another step and another, pausing briefly only when ancient boards complained with hushed creakings under his feet.

  Then he heard voices; he couldn’t tell quite what sorts of voices or exactly whence they came. And at last he saw a blurred glow of light. All his attention was focused on that light and on the voices scarcely less of a blur. So he was utterly oblivious of the fact that someone, not far behind him, had come to the door through which he had just entered; that that someone was stalking him as silently as he stalked those others somewhere before him. His only definite thought was, “Maybe, the damned place is haunted.”

  Chapter Seven

  He had made his way into the hushed building through what long ago had been a spacious kitchen. Had he turned to the right he would have come next to the long dining room, fronting on the veranda. Instead he had turned to the left and thus into the biggest room in the house, the essential room, the one that day and night had served most—the bar. There were still card tables dotting the sagging floor, and he moved forward cautiously less he brush against one and send the crippled thing toppling and crashing and making echoes. He couldn’t see a thing; he couldn’t have seen his hand if he had held it in front of him. Even the vague blur of light had vanished.

  That was because he had swerved into an angle of the room and the far door through which the dim glow had filtered was shut off by an out-jutting corner. He stood a moment, listening, making sure not to lose his bearings. Again he heard a voice, just one now, in a low, rumbling monotone; it made no more rhyme or reason in his ears than a bear’s growling. But it served to true up his sense of direction.

  While he stood rigid, breathing softly and straining eyes and ears together, the old quiet house began talking to his tense nerves. It was not so much that its stillness was interrupted, rather that it was accentuated by faint sounds as though it, like himself, held its breath and harkened and the slight tremors through the stillness were not of its doing. It was the night wind, as playful here as it knew how to be out in the depths of a forest, down on a remote seashore, through the cypresses of a cemetery—anywhere. A bit of paper did rustle, and its sound was somehow as sinister as the whisperings of murderers in a dark room.
The familiar tinny muted clash came back; you could think of it as the far-off whispering of cymbals passing back and forth over each other with so thin a sound that it was as though they merely kissed; the cold, shivery kisses of tin. And now and then, as though the old house did breathe and the walls were the walls of its ancient lungs, there was a dry-as-dust creaking.

  He moved on a dozen steps and saw again the ghostly light making its ill-defined wavering path across the floor, making sick shadows on the walls. The voice he had been listening to ran on but even yet none of the words were clear; a man in a place like this spoke under his breath because he was compelled to talk that way by the spell of his environment and whether or not he spoke secret things he’d scarcely more than whisper. Jeff thought, puzzling, “I know that voice. Whose is it?”

  Once more he groped forward; his hand slid along the smooth bar that was only slightly gritty with its accumulated dust. Presently he saw again the dim light; it made its wan pathway out from what had once been a private room just off the lobby, a room where Pay Dirt’s manager had had his office and where, many and many the night, the really important poker game was played.

  The muttering voice had died away but now it came again, and clearer and he knew at last whose it was. Bart Warbuck’s. And Warbuck’s tones were stepped down in a sort of repressed anger which threatened at any moment to flare up into stormy rage.

  “It might work with some men,” said Warbuck. “Not with me. I’d think you’d know me better than that by this time.”

  For answer he got first of all a dry rasping cackle of sheer malicious glee.

  “Oh, I know you all right, my dear Barton! Know you as nobody else in the world does, better a lot than your woman does though she’s lived with you over twenty years. And—”