by B. M. Bower
“There’s the widow,” said the foreman, wiping his eyes.
Casey turned and looked, but the widow was not in sight. The foreman, he judged, was speaking figuratively. He swung back glaring.
“You think I’m scared to tell her what happened? She’ll know I was sober if I say I was sober. She ain’t as big a fool—” He did not want to fight, although he was aching to lick every man of them. But for one thing, he was too sore and lame, and then, the widow would not like it.
With his neck very stiff, Casey limped down to the house and tried to tell the widow. But the widow was a woman, and she was hurt because Casey, since he was alive and not in the crevice, had not come straight to comfort her, but had lingered up there talking and laughing with the men. The widow had taken Casey’s part when the others said he must have been drunk. She had maintained, red-lidded and trembly of voice, that something had gone wrong with Casey’s car so that he couldn’t steer it. Such things happened, she knew.
Well, Casey told the widow the truth, and the widow’s face hardened while she listened. She had permitted him to kiss her when he came in, but now she moved away from him. She did not call him dear boy, nor even Casey dear. She waited until he had reached the point that puzzled him, the point of a Ford’s degree of intelligence. Then her lips thinned before she opened them.
“And what,” she asked coldly, “had you been drinking, Mr. Ryan?”
“Me? One bottle of lemon soda before I left town, and I left town at three o’clock in the afternoon. I swear—”
“You need not swear, Mr. Ryan.” The widow folded her hands and regarded him sternly, though her voice was still politely soft. “After I had told you repeatedly that my little ones should ever be guarded from a drinking father; after you had solemnly promised me that you would never again put glass to your lips, or swallow a drop of whisky; after that very morning renewing your pledge—”
“Well, I kept it,” Casey said, his face a shade paler under its usual frank red. “I swear to Gawd I was sober.”
“You need not lie,” said the widow, “and add to your misdeeds. You were drunk. No man in his senses would imagine what you imagine, or do what you did. I wish you to understand, Mr. Ryan, that I shall not marry you. I could not trust you out of my sight.”
“I—was—sober!” cried Casey, measuring his words. Very nearly shouting them, in fact.
The widow turned pointedly away and began to stir something on the stove, and did not look at him.
Casey went out, climbed the hill to his Ford, cranked it and went larruping down the hill, out on the lake and, when he had traversed half its length, turned and steered a straight course across it. Where tracings of wheels described a wide circle he stopped and regarded them intently. Then he began to swear, at nothing in particular, but with a hearty enjoyment of the phrases he intoned.
“Casey, you sure as hell have had one close call,” he remarked, when he could think of nothing new and devilish to say. “You mighta run along, and run along, till you got married to her. Whadda I want a wife for, anyway? Sour-dough biscuits tastes pretty good, and Casey sure can make ’em!” He got out his pipe, filled it and crammed down the tobacco, found a match and leaned back, smoking with relish, one leg thrown over the wheel.
“A man’s best friend is his Ford,” he exclaimed. “You can ask anybody.” He grinned, and blew a lot of smoke, and gave the wheel an affectionate little twist.
CHAPTER V
Some months later Casey waved good-by to the men from Tonopah, squinted up at the sun and got a coal-oil can of water, with which he filled the radiator of his Ford. He rolled his bed in the tarp and tied it securely, put flour, bacon, coffee, salt and various other small necessities of life into a box, inspected his sour-dough can, and decided to empty it and start over again if hard fate drove him to sourdough.
“Might bust down and have to sleep out,” he meditated. “Then, agin, I ain’t liable to; and if I do, I’ll be goin’ so fast I’ll git somewhere before she stops. I’m—sure—goin’ to go!”
He cranked the battered car, straddled in over the edge on the driver’s side and set his feet against the pedals with the air of a man who had urgent business elsewhere. The men from Tonopah were not yet out of sight around the butte scarred with rhyolite ledges before Casey was under way, rattling down the rough trail from Starvation Mountain and bouncing clear of the seat as the car lurched over certain rough spots.
Pinned with a safety pin to the inside pocket of the vest he wore only when he felt need of a safe and secret pocket, Casey Ryan carried a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, made payable to himself. A check for twenty-five thousand dollars in Casey’s pocket was like a wildcat clawing at his imagination and spitting at every moment’s delay. Casey had endured solitude and some hardship while he coaxed Starvation Mountain to reveal a little of its secret treasure. Now he wanted action, light, life and plenty of it. While he drove he dreamed, and his dreams beckoned, urged him faster and faster.
Up over the summit of the ridge that lay between Starvation and Furnace Lake he surged, with radiator bubbling. Down the long slope to the lake, lying there smiling sardonically at a world it loved to trick with its moods, Casey drove as if he were winning a bet. Across that five miles of baked, yellow-white clay he raced, his Ford a-creak in every joint.
“Go it, you tin lizard!” chortled Casey. “I’ll have me a real wagon when I git to Los. She’ll be white, with red stripes along her sides and red wheels, and she’ll lay ’er belly to the ground and eat up the road and lick her chops for more. Sixty miles under her belt every time the clock strikes, or she ain’t good enough fer Casey! Mebby they think they got some drivers in Californy. Mebby they think they have. They ain’t, though, because Casey Ryan ain’t there yet. I’ll catch that night train. Oughta be in by morning, and then you keep your eye on Casey. There’s goin’ to be a stir around Los, about tomorrow noon. I’ll have to buy some clothes, I guess. And I’ll git acquainted with some nice girl with yella hair that likes pleasure, and take her out ridin’. Yeah, I’ll have to git me a swell outfit uh clothes. I’ll look the part, all right—-”
Up a long, winding trail and over another summit to Yucca Pass Casey dreamed, while the stark, scarred buttes on either side regarded him with enigmatic calm. Since the first wagon train had worried over the rough deserts on their way to California, the bleak hills of Nevada had listened while prospectors dreamed aloud and cackled over their dreaming; had listened, too, while they raved in thirst and heat and madness. Inscrutably they watched Casey as he hurried by with his twenty-five thousand dollars and his pleasant pictures of soft ease.
At a dim fork in the trail Casey slowed and stopped. A boiling radiator will not forever brook neglect, and Casey brought his mind down to practical things for a space. “I can just as well take the train from Lund,” he mused, while he poured in more water. “Then I can leave this bleatin’ burro with Bill. He oughta give me a coupla hundred for her, anyway. No use wasting money just because you happen to have a few thousand in your pants.” He filled his pipe at that sensible idea and turned the nose of his Ford down the dim trail to Lund.
Eighty miles more or less straight away across the mountainous waste lay Lund, halfway up a canyon that led to higher reaches in the hills, rich in silver, lead, copper, gold. Silver it was that Casey had found and sold to the men from Tonopah, and it was a freak of luck, he thought whimsically, that had led him and his Ford away over to Starvation Mountains to find their stake when they had probably been driving over millions every day that they made the stage trip from Pinnacle down to Lund.
The trail was rutted in places where the sluicing rains had driven hard across the hills; soft with sand in places where the fierce winds had swept the open. For awhile the thin, wobbly track of a wagon meandered along ahead of him, then turned off up a flat-bottomed draw and was lost in the sagebrush. Some prospector not so lucky as he, thought Casey, with swift, soon forgotten sympathy. A coyote ran up a slope
toward him, halted with forefeet planted on a rock, and stared at him, ears perked like an inquisitive dog. Casey stopped, eased his rifle out of the crease in the back of the seat cushion, chanced a shot,—and his luck held. He climbed out, picked up the limp gray animal, threw it into the tonneau and went on. Even with twenty-five thousand dollars in his pocket, Casey told himself that coyote hides are not to be scorned. He had seen the time when the price of a good hide meant flour and bacon and tobacco to him. He would skin it when he stopped to eat.
Eighty miles with never a soul to call good day to Casey. Nor shack nor shelter made for man, and only one place where there was water to wet his lips if they cracked with thirst,—unless, perchance, one of those swift desert downpours came riding on the wind, lashing the clouds with lightning.
Far ahead of Casey such a storm rolled in off the barren hills to the south. “She’s a-wettin’ up that red lake a-plenty,” observed Casey, squinting through the dirty windshield. “No trail around, either, on account of the lava beds. But I guess I can pull acrost, all right.” Doubt was in his voice, however, and he was half minded to turn back and take the straight road to Vegas, which had been his first objective. But he discarded the idea.
“No, sir, Casey Ryan never back-trailed yet. Poor time to commence, now when I got the world by the tail and a downhill pull. We’ll make out, all right—can’t be so terrible boggy with a short rain like that there. I bet,” he continued optimistically to the Ford, which was the nearest he had to human companionship, “I bet we make it in a long lope. Git along, there! Shake a wheel—’s the last time you haul Casey around. Casey’s goin’ to step high, wide and handsome. Sixty miles an hour, or he’ll ask for his money back. They can’t step too fast for Casey! Blue—if I get me a lady friend with yella hair, mebby she’ll show up better in a blue car than she will in a white-and-red. This here turnout has got to be tasty and have class. If she was dark—” He shook his head at that. “No, sir, black hair grows too plenty on squaws an’ chilli queens. Yella goes with Casey. Clingin’ kinda girl with blue eyes—that’s the stuff! An’ I’ll sure show her some drivin’!”
He wondered whether he should try and find the girl first and buy the car to match her beauty, or buy the car first and with that lure the lady of his dreams. It was a nice question and it required thought. It was pleasant to ponder the problem, and Casey became so lost in meditation that he forgot to eat when the sun flirted with the scurrying clouds over his wind-torn automobile top.
So he came bouncing and swaying down the last mesa to the place called Red Lake. Casey had heard it spoken of with opprobrious epithets by men who had crossed it in wet weather. In dry weather it was red clay caked and checked by the sun, and wheels or hoofs stirred clouds of red dust that followed and choked the traveler.
Casey was not thinking at all of the lake when he drove down to it. He was seeing visions, though you would not think it to look at him; a stocky, middle-aged man who needed a shave and a hair-cut, wearing cheap, dirt-stained overalls and a blue shirt and square-toed shoes studded thickly on the soles with hobnails worn shiny; driving a desert-scarred Ford with most of the paint gone and a front fender cocked up and flapping crazily, and tires worn down to the fabric in places. But his eyes were very keen and steady, and there was a humorous twist to his mouth. If he dreamed incongruously of big, luxurious cars gorgeous in paint and nickel trim, and of slim young women with yellow hair and blue eyes,—well, stranger dreams have been hidden away behind exteriors more unsightly than was the shell which holds the soul of Casey Ryan.
Presently the practical, everyday side of his nature nudged him into taking note of his immediate surroundings. Red Lake had received a wetting. The dark, shiny surface betrayed that fact, and it was surprising how real water, when you did see it on a lake subject to mirage, was so unmistakably real. It is like putting flakes of real gold beside flakes of mica; you are ready to swear that the mica is gold—until you see the real gold beside it. So Casey knew at a glance that half of Red Lake was wet, and that the shiny patches here and there were not mirage pictures but shallow pools of water. Moreover, out in the reddest, wettest part of it an automobile stood with its back to him, and pigmy figures were moving slowly upon either side.
CHAPTER VI
“Stuck,” diagnosed Casey in one word, as he caught sight of the group ahead. He tucked his dream into the back of his mind while he pulled down the gas lever a couple of notches and lunged along the muddy ruts that led straight away from the safe line of sagebrush and out upon the platter-like red expanse.
The Ford grunted and lugged down to a steady pull, but Casey drove as he had driven his six horses on a steep grade in the old days, coaxing every ounce of power into action. He juggled with spark and gas and somehow kept her going, and finally stopped with nice judgment on a small island of harder clay within shouting distance of the car ahead. He killed the engine then and stepped down, and went picking his way carefully out to it, his heavy shoes speedily collecting great pancakes of mud that clung like glue.
“Stuck, hey? You oughta kept in the ruts, no matter if they are water-logged. You never want to turn outa the road on one of these lake beds, huntin’ dry ground. If it’s wet in the road, you can bank on sinkin’ in to the hocks the minute you turn out.” He carefully removed the mud pancakes from his shoes by scraping them across the hub of the stalled car and edged back to stand with his arms on his hips while he surveyed the full plight of them.
“She sure is bogged down a-plenty,” he observed, grinning sympathetically.
“Could you hitch on your car, Mister, and pull us out?” This was a woman’s voice, and it thrilled Casey, woman hungry as he was.
Casey put up a hand to his mouth and surreptitiously removed a chew of tobacco almost fresh. With some effort he pulled his feet closer together, and he lifted his old Stetson and reset it at a consciously rakish angle. He glanced at the car, behind it and in front, coming back to the depressed male individual before him. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll get you out, all right. Sure, I will.”
“We’ve been stalled here for an hour or more,” volunteered the depressed one. “We was right behind the storm. Looked a sorry chance that anybody would come along for the next week or so.”
“Mister, you’re a godsend, if ever there was one. I’d write your name on the roster of saints in my prayer book, if I ever said prayers and had a prayer book and a pencil and knew what name to write.”
“Casey Ryan. Don’t you worry, ma’am. We’ll get you outa here in no time.” Casey grinned and craned his neck. Looking lower this time, he saw a pair of feet which did not seem to belong to that voice, though they were undoubtedly feminine. Still, red mud will work miracles of disfigurement, and Casey was an optimist by nature.
“My wife is trying out a new comedy line,” the man observed unemotionally. “Trouble is it never gets over, out front. If she ever did get it across the footlights, I could raise the price of admission and get away with it. How far is it to Rhyolite?”
“Rhyolite? Twenty or twenty-five miles, mebby.” Casey gave him an inquiring look.
“Can we get there in time to paper the town and hire a hall to show in, Mister?” Casey saw the mud-caked feet move laboriously toward the rear of the car.
“Yes, ma’am, I guess you can. There ain’t any town, though, and it ain’t got any hall in it, nor anybody to go to a show.”
The woman laughed. “That’s like my prayer book. Well, Jack, you certainly have got a powerful eye, but you’ve been trying to Svengali this out-fit out of the mud for an hour, and I haven’t seen it move an inch, so far. Let’s just try something else.”
“A prayer outa your prayer book, maybe,” her husband retorted, not troubling to move or turn his head.
Casey blinked and looked again. The woman who appeared from the farther side of the car might have been the creature of his dream, so far as her face, her hair and her voice went. Her hair was yellow, unmistakably yellow. Her eyes were bluer than Casey�
�s own, and she had nice teeth and showed them in a red-lipped smile. A more sophisticated man would have known that the powder on her nose was freshly applied, and that her reason for remaining so long hidden from his sight while she talked to him was revealed in the moist color on her lips and the fresh bloom on her cheeks. Casey was not sophisticated. He thought she was a beautiful woman and asked no questions of her make-up box.
“Mister, you certainly are a godsend!” she gushed again when she faced him. “I’d call you a direct answer to prayer, only I haven’t been praying. I’ve been trying to tell Jack that the shovel is not packed under the banjos, as he thinks it was, but was left back at our last camp where he was trying to dig water out of a wet spot. Jack, dear, perhaps the gentleman has got a shovel in his car. Ain’t it a real gag, Mister, us being stuck out here in a dry lake?”
Casey touched his hat and grinned and tried not to look at her too long. Husbands of beautiful young women are frequently jealous, and Casey knew his place and meant to keep it.
All the way back to his car Casey studied the peculiar features of the meeting. He had been thinking about yellow-haired women—well! But of course, she was married, and therefore not to be thought of save as a coincidence; still, Casey rather regretted the existence of Jack dear, and began to wonder why good-looking women always picked such dried-up little runts for husbands. “Show actors by the talk,” he mused. “I wonder now if she don’t sing, mebby?”
He started the car and forged out to them, making the last few rods in low gear and knowing how risky it was to stop. They were rather helpless, he had to admit, and did all the standing around while Casey did all the work. But he shoveled the rear wheels out, waded back to the tiny island of solid ground and gathered an armful of brush, which he crowded in front of the wheels, covering himself with mud thereby; then he tied the tow rope he carried for emergencies like this, waded to the Ford, cranked and trusted the rest to luck. The Ford moved slowly ahead until the rope between the two cars tightened, then spun her wheels and proceeded to dig herself in where she stood. The other car, shaking with the tremor of its own engine, ruthlessly ground the sagebrush into the mud and stood upon it roaring and spluttering furiously.
