The Third Western Megapack

by Barker, S. Omar

  Jerry sat in silence, with a puzzled frown on his face for a long minute, and then, “If the old boy did hide his money, he must have cached it up somewhere close. He never would have buried it on some other fellow’s land. It must be in the house.”

  “No, it is not about the house. Mamma has looked everywhere. There are only three rooms. The front room is Mike Cullinan’s old barroom. There never was any floor in it, and mamma has dug up every inch of it, down to the solid rock, which isn’t more than a foot below the surface. She has looked in every possible place about the house, and has examined the wall around the yard again and again. She has never found any sort of hiding place. She still believes there was money, and she broods over it until sometimes I’m afraid it has turned her mind.”

  “I see. What about its being under this pile of rocks around the old tree?”

  “Not a chance. Half a dozen times since grandfather’s death, we have found these rocks scattered over the yard, and built them back again. That’s how we know someone else is looking for the hidden money. The first time, mamma took a pick and dug to the rocks, all around the tree. We know it isn’t there.”

  Jerry cut his eye down at a queer shaped piece of stone in the pyramid. There was no other stone like it in the assortment of rocks that formed the pyramid. He glanced up at the towering bluff, fixed his eye on a thin stratum of peculiar colored stone that ran along the face of it, but said nothing about it. They went on talking about various things, until sunset, then went in to supper.

  Mrs. Kingsley said she was very sleepy, and if Jerry would excuse them and take his stand outside the house, they’d go to bed, so she could get a much needed night’s sleep.

  * * * *

  Few men in the old mining town had more to puzzle them than had Jerry Borden that night. A little cluster of bushes grew against the high south wall of the premises, about midway between the front and the back. In the deep shadow of these bushes Jerry took his stand soon after nightfall. The little gate that led to the street was barred on the inside. No entrance could be made at the front of the house. The side walls were blind. From where he sat, he could see the door and two windows at the rear. He could also see the north wall from the house, back to the cliff, and by merely turning his head, he could see full length of the south wall, in either direction. It would be a skilful prowler indeed he thought who would come into that enclosure that night, without being seen.

  The hours dragged on. As a sleuth and watchman, Jerry was a fine sign painter. For the hundredth time, he went over in his mind the wild yarn that Leota had told him. The only conclusion he could reach was that Calico Capen had been slightly touched in the head. It was also obvious that Mrs. Kingsley had brooded over that lost money until her own mind was a bit off center. He wondered then if insanity ran in the Capen family. No, he wouldn’t believe that. Leota wasn’t crazy. He didn’t want to believe in the hereditary insanity of the Capens, but still—

  Jerry must have dozed in spite of his determination to stay awake all night. Anyway, he started when he heard a foot scrape lightly on the pyramid of rocks at the base of the old tree, and just got a glimpse of a man’s foot and lower leg, as it disappeared in the thick foliage of the tree. Here was a fine situation. Jerry had his man up a tree, but what could he do? Nothing, but sit and watch him.

  He did just that, and after what seemed an age, the man came down and started to climb the south wall again. Jerry knew the prowler had no business in there and ought to know that he had been seen. Still, such a man was likely to be pretty rough and to go armed. He’d throw his gun on him, and talk to him a bit. The man was on the top of the wall, when Jerry threw his pistol on him and opened his mouth to call to the fellow, but—he didn’t. Jerry didn’t know it was a double action gun he had. In the tense moment, he gripped the trigger. There was a flash and roar, the prowler pitched off the wall, Jerry heard a muttered oath on the other side, and presently he heard the fellow going along the wall on the other side. It was a vacant lot, the shack that had stood on it having been blown away in the great storm and never rebuilt.

  Jerry ran to the little gate and peered out just in time to see the fellow turn down the street toward town. The prowler was limping along. Evidently, Jerry had hit him, though he had not meant to do so.

  “Guess he knows he was watched, anyway,” mused Jerry, as he went back into the walled yard, and answered Mrs. Kingsley’s frightened call. He told her all he knew, which wasn’t much. She finally went back to bed, and Jerry kept his vigil until daylight, but the prowler did not return. As daylight came, Jerry climbed the old tree himself, but got nothing for his pains. He was more puzzled than ever, when he came down.

  “Jerry,” said Mrs. Kingsley, at breakfast. “I never can stay here alone with Leota again, after this. Can’t you come—”

  “Why, I’d like to, Mrs. Kingsley, but I’d have to have some sort of excuse.” And he looked at Leota, who blushed and looked at her plate. “I—I mean, I’d have to be doing something up here. I might bring my ladder and some paint and paint the front of the house.”

  “Do that. Do anything, so you stay here at night. We won’t be safe here, after this.”

  By noon, Jerry’s outfit was at Calico’s Castle, but rarely has there been seen on this earth a castle that had so little woodwork to paint. He put a tentative coat of priming on the front door, which drank it up greedily. Then he went down town a while in the afternoon. While there, he overheard the city marshal and another man talking.

  “Funny case,” said the marshal. “Picked him up about daylight this morning. Bad flesh wound in his leg, and he’d bled until he was white. Took him to the hospital, but he won’t talk. Says he don’t know who shot him and won’t tell where he was when it happened. We’re holding him until he gets better. There’s something crooked about this. It must have happened in the north part of town, but there’s nothing left in Tightwad except Calico’s Castle and a few cabins.”

  Jerry went back to the castle with a full grown idea in his head. That prowler would never have taken the chances he had taken, unless he knew there was money about the old place, and had a pretty good idea where it was. The fellow would be out of it for a while. The only thing was whether he had a confederate. Back at the castle, Jerry and Leota held a long consultation under the old cherry tree. Mrs. Kingsley was not blind to the situation between the young people, but for once she was mistaken. They were not making love.

  Soon after dark that evening, Jerry carried his long extension ladder to the tree, and ran it up the bluff just behind the tree from the house. Leota stood on the ground at the foot of the ladder. Jerry went up, up, up until he came to that ribbon of light colored stone, thirty feet from the ground. He had seen two vertical cracks in that queer stratum of stone, about two feet apart, and the top of the ladder rested just beneath them.

  “Gee, that granddad of yours must have been some man,” panted Jerry, half an hour later, as he and Leota stood under the old tree. “That rock must have weighed a hundred pounds after he broke the back part off of it, and he must have carried it up the old cherry tree and put it in place! All I had to do was push on one end of it, and pull a little on the other end. It turned and there the stuff was.”

  “Are you sure that’s all?”

  “Yes. I could feel clean to the back of the cache. You can tell ’em it’s aplenty. Mostly gold dust and gold coin in leather pouches.”

  “Did you put the rock back?”

  “Yes. Just like it was. All we got to do now is wag this stuff to the house, then you and your mother can get ready to leave the country with it, and nobody the wiser.”

  Far toward morning, a candle burned in Mike Cullinan’s old barroom, while Mrs. Kingsley worked feverishly at packing the treasure in the center of several strong, old fashioned trunks, filled with bedding and old clothes. They meant to leave Gold Center next day, ne
ver to return. Jerry estimated the find at a hundred thousand dollars. That might not be all of Calico Capen’s hoardings, but it was enough. At last, Jerry and Leota walked out the old back door at dawn. There was no trace of their activities of the night before. They strolled over to the old tree.

  “Jerry,” said Leota, “I know now that you’re square. You could have taken all that money for yourself, and no one would ever have been the wiser. I think it’s—”

  “But, Leota, it wasn’t the money I wanted.”

  “I know that, now, and—you made me promise to tell you when I was willing for you to talk—to talk to me that way again, and—and I—” She stole into his arms; and he didn’t talk much after all.

  * * * *

  Jerry Borden and the Kingsleys left Gold Center that day, over the railway that had been built since Mrs. Kingsley and Leota had come in on the old stage.

  Down at the city hospital, a slender man, white to the paleness of marble, told the city chief his story. He said he was the young man who was with the big gambler the night of the fight in the Yellow Metal. He admitted that he had tried to find Calico’s Cache, before Mrs. Kingsley and her daughter ever came to Gold Center. That after they came, he had to stop the search, and then he hit on the idea of bringing in a card shark, and getting the money over the gaming table. The result was that shrewd old Calico had caught the shark with the goods, on the second deal, and being what was called an honest gambler himself, Calico had gone berserk, and killed the crooked gambler, losing his own life in the battle.

  The slender man said he had then gone away, but had sneaked back several times, and tried to locate the money. Nothing was ever done with the slender stranger for his part in the episode, for he died next day, though Jerry Borden never knew that he had killed a man.

  There are still a few old-timers in Gold Center who remember Calico Capen. As they drowse over their checkers and pinochle and talk of the good old days, they sometimes mention him, and the night he won Mike Cullinan’s saloon. None of them know that Calico came in late at night, when the rest of Tightwad was asleep, and hundreds of times climbed the old wild cherry tree and hid his winnings in the cache he had made. Calico’s Castle became a land-mark. Many tales were told about the fabulous wealth that lay buried there, and parties of young people still go there, and talk under the old cherry tree—some, perhaps, of the buried treasure, but likely more of them of the things that interested Jerry and Leota most. And so, Calico Capen has passed into history. Peace to his ashes! He was as near honest as a gambler can be.

  FLAPJACK MEEHAN’S FOURTH ACE, by Frank Richardson Pierce

  “Tubby” Willows gasped in amazement as he noticed an old miner emerging from the rooms occupied jointly by himself and his partner, “Flapjack” Meehan. The man was round shouldered and gray headed; his clothing had been stylish fifteen years ago, the coat had faded until it was almost green. He wore moccasins, and from the sagging of his coat pockets it was evident that he carried a poke or two of gold. The genial sour dough moved his five feet and one hundred and eighty pounds from behind the New Deal Cafe counter and studied the newcomer at close range. There was something familiar about him, yet Tubby could not place the man.

  “What are you doing in my room?” he demanded curiously.

  The voice and reply almost floored him. “It’s as much my room as yours!”

  “Sufferin’ Malemutes, Flapjack, when did you get into camp, and what’s the idear of the gray hair and old clothes? B’gosh, you fooled me for fair!”

  The round shoulders vanished as Flapjack straightened up, but the hair and beard were as gray as ever. The gold in the pokes was real.

  “You recall, Tubby, that you handed me three or four letters just as I was going into the hills to look after some of our claims?”

  “Yep!”

  “Well, here’s one of them, read it!”

  Tubby recalled the handwriting instantly, for it was in a feminine hand, and he wondered at the time if his partner of a quarter century was indulging in romance. He opened the letter and read:

  My Dear Mr. Meehan:

  Though you are a stranger to me, just the same I feel as if I’ve known you for years, as my husband swears by you. He is employed in one of your mines and tells me you pay the best wages and that the working conditions are better than any other mine in Alaska. Each year when you close down for the winter he is paid off, but when he reaches home, he is broke. This is hard on us, and hard on him, for it means he must work when he should rest. It is all on account of “the little game” he gets into on the boat coming down. I don’t think the game is square. What do you think? Can’t you do something? It means so much to us.

  Sincerely,

  MARY KEENE.

  Tubby Willows swore as he finished reading. “We both know, Flapjack, that the games are not always on the square. Professional gamblers travel steerage in fall on the southbound boats, pass off as miners or trappers, and trim the boys to a finish. What’s the idea of your disguise?”

  “I’m a poor old miner right from the hills, going out for the first time in twenty years. I’ve struck it rich, and I’m, praying that that crowd of professionals will try and trim, me. I figured it all out, Tubby, while in the hills. That’s why I let my whiskers and hair grow a bit.”

  “But you’re only a little bit gray above the ears, and now it appears you’re almost white in spots!” Tubby was mystified.

  Flapjack grinned. “A little fixing, Tubby, that’s all. What do you think of the hump across the shoulders? Only years turning a windlass gives a fellow a back like that!” Standing four inches over six feet, Flapjack had ample length for several kinks in his back. Even his partner admitted he looked the part.

  “Keep this dark,” Flapjack continued. “We don’t want it to get out. If I can fool you I can fool anybody, and for a minute I had you guessing.”

  “You’re taking your old .44 along, Flapjack?”

  “Yes, naturally; but I don’t expect any gun play. The present generation of gamblers aren’t so tough as the old boys, nor as square by a long shot!”

  “You said it, but a gun is handy. Better wear it in a shoulder holster.”

  As a rule Flapjack did the acting for the pair, and Tubby did the thinking. It was a combination hard to beat, though on occasion Flapjack could think fast and Tubby Willows could draw as quick as the next man.

  For several days Flapjack roomed in an old cabin and ate his meals at the New Deal Café. When the mines closed down for lack of water, he headed outside with the others and in time checked his pokes of gold with the ship’s purser and spread his blankets in one of the steerage bunks. Those with whom he traveled knew him as “Old Man” Anderson. It was rumored in the fo’c’s’le that Anderson had “struck it,” before he went crazy from missing too many boats. He was close-lipped, it seemed, and was understood to have checked twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold. Rumor overestimated the contents of Flapjack’s pokes by seventeen thousand dollars.

  * * * *

  Steaming through the calm waters of the inside passage the men whiled away the long hours by card playing. Except when the officers chanced to pass along, there was always some money in sight, and in the “big games” stacks of chips helped conceal the real money at stake. Draw, stud, and blackjack were by far the most popular, with a group of Chinese in one corner playing a game of their own which the chechahcos aboard decided was mahjong, but wasn’t. The air was heavy with smoke. The different groups were strangely silent. Hand after hand was played. Once a Chinaman from one of the canneries protested when a player neglected to toss the required number of chips into the pot. His face had not changed expression until then. He donned his mask when the player silently shoved the required chips to the center. The play was resumed.

  Old Man Anderson stood silently by, his age belied by the gleam i
n his eyes as he watched a thin-lipped man with cold gray eyes. He called himself Pete Olson, and had boarded the steamer at La Touche.

  “Coffee and san’wiches! Coffee and san’wiches!” A mess boy pushed his way through. He collected two bits each and some one who resented the graft, mocked him. Others took it up, then silence. The stakes were larger now. Olson was winning. A trapper named McGuire, with a good hand, played steadily.

  “Raise!” he growled out.

  Others dropped out, except Olson.

  The pot grew. McGuire laid his hand face down and stood up.

  “I’m cleaned of money!” he announced. “But wait!”

  He disappeared and returned with a silver-fox pelt. It was a beauty, and he shook the skin quickly, and by the rattle and the lay of the fur, those who understood knew it was a prime skin. “How much?” he demanded.

  “Turn it!” Olson spoke for the first time.

  McGuire turned the skin inside out, and Olson examined it. “Prime!” he announced. “Fair skin. Hundred dollars!”

  McGuire sneered. “Taking that skin out for my wife. Even a cheap, grafting fur dealer would give a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred. Made up and around a woman’s neck it’s worth six or eight hundred dollars. That ain’t an island skin; that’s trapped wild in the interior. Can you tell the difference?”

  Olson could not, but his business was to bluff. “All right,” he snapped out: “Two hundred dollars!” The pelt was laid on the table and two hundred dollars’ worth of chips taken from the pot. Olson shoved them back. “Raise you!” he said briefly.