by B. M. Bower
She watched him warily, half-turned, ready to run away. “We—I—aren’t you going to be nice and say good-by to me?”
He came on, staring at her and saying nothing.
“Well, if you still want to sulk—I wouldn’t be as nasty as that, and—and hold a grudge the way you do—and I was going to be nice and forgiving; but if you don’t care, and don’t want—”
By this time he was close—quite close. “Yuh know I care! And yuh know I want—you. Oh, girlie, girlie!”
* * * *
The colors had all left the sky, save blue and silver-gray, and the sun was a commonplace, dazzling ball of yellow. Charming Billy Boyle, his hat set back upon his head at a most eloquent angle, led Barney from the creek up to the stable. His eyes were alight and his brow was unwrinkled. His lips had quite lost their bitter lines, and once more had the humorous, care-free quirk at the corners.
He slammed the stable-door behind him and went off down the street, singing exultantly:
“—I have been to see my-wife,
She’s the joy of my life—”
He jerked open the door of the shack, gave a whoop to raise the dead, and took Dill ungently by the shoulder.
“Come alive, yuh seven-foot Dill-pickle! What yuh want to lay here snoring for at this time uh day? Don’t yuh know it’s morning?”
Dill sat up and blinked, much like an owl in the sunshine. He puckered his face into a smile. “Aren’t you rather uproarious—for so early in the day, William? I was under the impression that one usually grew hilarious—”
“Oh, there’s other things besides whisky to make a man feel good,” grinned Billy, his cheeks showing a tinge of red. “I’m in a hurry, Dilly. I’ve got to hit the trail immediate—and if it ain’t too much trouble to let me have that money yuh spoke about—”
Dill got out of bed, eying him shrewdly. “Have you been gambling, William?”
Billy ran the green shade up from the window so energetically that it slipped from his fingers and buzzed noisily at file top. He craned his neck, trying to see the hotel. “Maybe yuh’d call it that—an old bachelor like you! Yuh see, Dilly, I’ve got business over in Tower. I’ve got to be there before noon, and I need—aw, thunder! How’s a man going to get married when he’s only got six dollars in his jeans?”
“I should say that would be scarcely feasible, William.” Dill was smiling down at the lacing of his shoes. “We can soon remedy that, however. I’m—I’m very glad, William.”
The cheeks of Charming Billy Boyle grew quite red. “And, by the way, Dilly,” he said hurriedly, as if he shied at the subject of his love and his marriage, “I’ve changed my mind about going to New Mexico. I—we’ll settle down on the Bridger place, if yuh still want me to. She says she’d rather stay here in this country.”
Dill settled himself into his clothes, went over, and laid a hand awkwardly upon Billy’s arm, “I am very glad, William,” he said simply.
THE LOOKOUT MAN (Part 1)
CHAPTER ONE
SOME TIME!
From the obscurity of vast, unquiet distance the surf came booming in with the heavy impetus of high tide, flinging long streamers of kelp and bits of driftwood over the narrowing stretch of sand where garishly costumed bathers had lately shrieked hilariously at their gambols. Before the chill wind that had risen with the turn of the tide the bathers retreated in dripping, shivering groups, to appear later in fluffs and furs and woollen sweaters; still inclined to hilarity, still undeniably both to leave off their pleasuring at Venice, dedicated to cheap pleasures.
But when the wind blew stronger and the surf boomed louder and nearer, and the faint moon-path stretched farther and farther toward the smudgy sky-line, city-going street-cars began to fill with sunburned passengers, and motors began to purr out of the narrow side streets lined with shoddy buildings which housed the summer sojourners. One more Sunday night’s revelry was tapering off into shouted farewells, clanging gongs, honking horns and the shuffling of tired feet hurrying homeward.
In cafes and grills and private dining rooms groups of revelers, whose pleasures were not halted by the nickel alarm-clocks ticking inexorably all over the city and its suburbs, still lingered long after the masses had gone home yawning and counting the fullness of past joys by the present extent of smarting sunblisters.
Automobiles loaded with singing passengers scurried after their own beams of silver light down the boulevards. At first a continuous line of speeding cars; then thinning with long gaps between; then longer gaps with only an occasional car; then the quiet, lasting for minutes unbroken, so that the wind could be heard in the eucalyptus trees that here and there lined the boulevard.
After the last street-car had clanged away from the deserted bunting-draped joy zone that now was stark and joyless, a belated seven-passenger car, painted a rich plum color and splendid in upholstering and silver trim, swept a long row of darkened windows with a brush of light as it swung out from a narrow alley and went purring down to where the asphalt shone black in the night.
Full throated laughter and a medley of shouted jibes and current witticisms went with it. The tonneau squirmed with uproarious youth. The revolving extra seats swung erratically, propelled by energetic hands, while some one barked the stereotyped invitation to the deserted scenic swing, and some one else shouted to the revolving occupants to keep their heads level, and all the others laughed foolishly.
The revolving ones rebelled, and in the scuffle some one lurched forward against the driver at a critical turn in the road, throwing him against the wheel. The big car swerved almost into the ditch, was brought back just in the nick of time and sped on, while Death, who had looked into that tonneau, turned away with a shrug.
The driver, bareheaded and with the wind blowing his thick mop of wavy hair straight back from his forehead, glanced back with swift disfavor at the scuffling bunch.
“Hey—you want to go in the ditch?” he expostulated, chewing vigorously upon gum that still tasted sweet and full-flavored. “You wanta cut out that rough stuff over this way!”
“All right, Jackie, old boy, anything to please!” chanted the offender, cuffing the cap off the fellow next him. “Some time,” he added with vague relish. “S-o-m-e time! What?”
“Some time is right!” came the exuberant chorus. “Hey, Jack! You had some time, all right—you and that brown-eyed queen that danced like Mrs. Castle. Um-um! Floatin’ round with your arms full of sunshine—oh, you thought you was puttin’ something over on the rest of us—what?”
“Cut it out!” Jack retorted, flinging the words over his shoulder. “Don’t talk to me. Road’s flopping around like a snake with its head cut off—” He laughed apologetically, his eyes staring straight ahead over the lowered windshield.
“Aw, step on her, Jack! Show some class, boy—show some class! Good old boat! If you’re too stewed to drive ’er, she knows the way home. Say, Jackie, if this old car could talk, wouldn’t momma get an ear-full on Monday, hey? What if she—”
“Cut it out—or I’ll throw you out!” came back over Jack’s shirt-clad shoulder. He at least had the wit to use what little sense he had in driving the car, and he had plenty of reason to believe that he could carry out his threat, even if the boulevard did heave itself up at him like the writhings of a great snake. If his head was not fit for the job, his trained muscles would still drive with automatic precision. Only his vision was clouded; not the mechanical skill necessary to pilot his mother’s big car safely into the garage.
Whim held the five in the rear seats absorbed in their own maudlin comicalities. The fellow beside Jack did not seem to take any interest in his surroundings, and the five gave the front seat no further attention. Jack drove circumspectly, leaning a little forward, his bare arms laid up across the wheel and grasping the top of it. Brown as bronze, those arms, as were his face and neck and chest down to where the open V of his sport shirt was held closed with the loose knot of a crimson tie that whipped his shoulder as he dro
ve. A fine looking fellow he was, sitting there like the incarnation of strength and youth and fullblooded optimism. It was a pity that he was drunk—he would have been a perfect specimen of young manhood, else.
The young man on the front seat beside him turned suddenly on those behind. The lower half of his face was covered with a black muffler. He had a gun, and he “cut down” on the group with disconcerting realism.
“Hands up!” he intoned fearsomely. “I am the mysterious lone bandit of the boulevards. Your jewels are the price of your lives!” The six-shooter wavered, looking bleakly at one and then another.
After the first stunned interval, a shout of laughter went up from those behind. “Good! Good idea!” one approved. And another, having some familiarity with the mechanics of screen melodrama, shouted, “Camera!”
“Lone bandit nothing! We’re all mysterious auto bandits out seeking whom we may devour!” cried a young man with a naturally attractive face and beautiful teeth, hastily folding his handkerchief cornerwise for a mask, and tying it behind his head—to the great discomfort of his neighbors, who complained bitterly at having their eyes jabbed out with his elbows.
The bandit play caught the crowd. For a few tumultuous minutes elbows were up, mufflers and handkerchiefs flapping. There emerged from the confusion six masked bandits, and three of them flourished six-shooters with a recklessness that would have given a Texas man cold chills down his spine. Jack, not daring to take his eyes off the heaving asphalt, or his hands off the wheel, retained his natural appearance until some generous soul behind him proceeded, in spite of his impatient “Cut it out, fellows!” to confiscate his flapping, red tie and bind it across his nose; which transformed Jack Corey into a speeding fiend, if looks meant anything. Thereafter they threw themselves back upon the suffering upholstery and commented gleefully upon their banditish qualifications.
That grew tame, of course. They thirsted for mock horrors, and two glaring moons rising swiftly over a hill gave the psychological fillip to their imaginations.
“Come on-let’s hold ’em up!” cried the young man on the front seat. “Naw-I’ll tell you! Slow down, Jack, and everybody keep your faces shut. When we’re just past I’ll shoot down at the ground by a hind wheel. Make ’em think they’ve got a blowout—get the idea?”
“Some idea!” promptly came approval, and the six subsided immediately.
The coming car neared swiftly, the driver shaving as close to the speed limit as he dared. Unsuspectingly he swerved to give plenty of space in passing, and as he did so a loud bang startled him. The brake squealed as he made an emergency stop. “Blowout, by thunder!” they heard him call to his companions, as he piled out and ran to the wheel he thought had suffered the accident.
Jack obligingly slowed down so that the six, leaning far out and craning back at their victims, got the full benefit of their joke. When he sped on they fell back into their seats and howled with glee.
It was funny. They laughed and slapped one another on the backs, and the more they laughed the funnier it seemed. They rocked with mirth, they bounced up and down on the cushions and whooped.
All but Jack. He kept his eyes on the still-heaving asphalt, and chewed gum and grinned while he drove, with the persistent sensation that he was driving a hydro-aeroplane across a heaving ocean. Still, he knew what the fellows were up to, and he was perfectly willing to let them have all the fun they wanted, so long as they didn’t interfere with his driving.
In the back of his mind was a large, looming sense of responsibility for the car. It was his mother’s car, and it was new and shiny, and his mother liked to drive flocks of fluttery, middle-aged ladies to benefit teas and the like. It had taken a full hour of coaxing to get the car for the day, and Jack knew what would be the penalty if anything happened to mar its costly beauty. A scratch would be almost as much as his life was worth. He hoped dazedly that the fellows would keep their feet off the cushions, and that they would refrain from kicking the back seat.
Mrs. Singleton Corey was a large, firm woman who wore her white hair in a marcelled pompadour, and frequently managed to have a flattering picture of herself in the Sunday papers—on the Society-and-Club-Doings page, of course. She figured prominently in civic betterment movements, and was loud in her denunciation of Sunday dances and cabarets and the frivolities of Venice and lesser beach resorts. She did a lot of worrying over immodest bathing suits, and never went near the beach except as a member of a purity committee, to see how awfully young girls behaved in those public places.
She let Jack have the car only because she believed that he was going to take a party of young Christian Endeavorers up Mount Wilson to view the city after dark. She could readily apprehend that such a sight might be inspiring, and that it would act as a spur upon the worthy ambitions of the young men, urging them to great achievements. Mrs. Singleton Corey had plenty of enthusiasm for the betterment of young lives, but she had a humanly selfish regard for the immaculateness of her new automobile, and she feared that the roads on the mountain might be very dusty and rough, and that overhanging branches might snag the top. Jack had to promise that he would be very careful of overhanging branches.
Poor lady, she never dreamed that her son was out at Venice gamboling on the beach with bold hussies in striped bathing trunks and no skirts; fox-trotting with a brown-eyed imp from the telephone office, and drinking various bottled refreshments—carousing shamelessly, as she would have said of a neighbor’s son—or that, at one-thirty in the morning, he was chewing a strong-flavored gum to kill the odor of alcohol.
She was not sitting up waiting for him and wondering why he did not come. Jack had been careful to impress upon her that the party might want to view the stars until very late, and that he, of course, could not hurry them down from the mountain top.
You will see then why Jack was burdened with a sense of deep responsibility for the car, and why he drove almost as circumspectly as if he were sober, and why he would not join in the hilarity of the party.
“Hist! Here comes a flivver!” warned the young man on the front seat, waving his revolver backward to impress silence on the others. “Let’s all shoot! Make ’em think they’ve run into a mess of tacks!”
“Aw, take a wheel off their tin wagon!” a laughter-hoarse voice bettered the plan.
“Hold ’em up and take a nickel off ’em—if they carry that much on their persons after dark,” another suggested.
“You’re on, bo! This is a hold-up. Hist!”
A hold-up they proceeded to make it. They halted the little car with a series of explosions as it passed. The driver was alone, and as he climbed out to inspect his tires, he confronted what looked to his startled eyes like a dozen masked men. Solemnly they went through his pockets while he stood with his hands high above him. They took his half-plug of chewing tobacco and a ten-cent stick-pin from his tie, and afterwards made him crank his car and climb back into the seat and go on. He went—with the throttle wide open and the little car loping down the boulevard like a scared pup.
“Watch him went!” shrieked one they called Hen, doubling himself together in a spasm of laughter.
“‘He was—here—when we started, b-but he was—gone—when we got th’ough!’” chanted another, crudely imitating a favorite black-faced comedian.
Jack, one arm thrown across the wheel, leaned out and looked back, grinning under the red band stretched across the middle of his face. “Ah, pile in!” he cried, squeezing his gum between his teeth and starting the engine. “He might come back with a cop.”
That tickled them more than ever. They could hardly get back into the car for laughing. “S-o-m-e little bandits!—what?” they asked one another over and over again.
“S-o-m-e little bandits is—right!” the approving answer came promptly.
“S-o-m-e time, bo, s-o-m-e time!” a drink-solemn voice croaked in a corner of the big seat.
Thus did the party of Christian Endeavorers return sedately from their trip to Mount W
ilson.
CHAPTER TWO
“THANKS FOR THE CAR”
They held up another car with two men in it, and robbed them of insignificant trifles in what they believed to be a most ludicrous manner. Afterward they enjoyed prolonged spasms of mirth, their cachinnations carrying far out over the flat lands disturbing inoffensive truck gardeners in their sleep. They cried “S-o-m-e time!” so often that the phrase struck even their fuddled brains as being silly.
They met another car—a large car with three women in the tonneau. These, evidently, were home-going theatre patrons who had indulged themselves in a supper afterwards. They were talking quietly as they came unsuspectingly up to the big, shiny machine that was traveling slowly townward, and they gave it no more than a glance as they passed.
Then came the explosion, that sounded surprisingly like a blowout. The driver stopped and got out to look for trouble, his companion at his heels. They confronted six masked men, three of them displaying six-shooters.
“Throw up your hands!” commanded a carefully disguised voice.
The driver obeyed—but his right hand came up with an automatic pistol in it. He fired straight into the bunch—foolishly, perhaps; at any rate harmlessly, though they heard the bullet sing as it went by. Startled, one of the six fired back impulsively, and the other two followed his example. Had they tried to kill, in the night and drunk as they were, they probably would have failed; but firing at random, one bullet struck flesh. The man with the automatic flinched backward, reeled forward drunkenly and went down slowly, his companion grasping futilely at his slipping body.
“Hey, you darn mutts, whatcha shootin’ for? Hell of a josh, that is!” Jack shouted angrily and unguardedly. “Cut that out and pile in here!”
While the last man was clawing in through the door, Jack let in the clutch, slamming the gear-lever from low to high and skipping altogether the intermediate. The big car leaped forward and Hen bit his tongue so that it bled. Behind them was confused shouting.
