Plundered Cargo/Chapter 2

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter II

FATE AMID THE CABBAGES

The motorman of the chartered car gave Spike Horn's sailing orders the widest interpretation, doubtless arguing to himself that there was little use getting back on the more crowded network of the traction system where he would have to arrange for meeting and passing other cars on regular schedule. He chose, therefore, to follow the most roundabout way back to the city from the playgrounds around the Cliff House; traveling along the new line around Twin Peaks. At this hour, which was approaching midnight, he would not meet an outgoing trolley, on these sand dune wastes, oftener than once in thirty minutes. He knew the location of the brief intervals of double track where he could draw aside to make the passing.

So a frame of blazing light went rocketing through a fog wilderness, trailing fugitive strains of music.

Within the snug security of the palace car all was well. Though Doctor Chitterly did not believe in spirituous liquors, ardent waters in a square bottle once having been responsible for his being marooned in his nightshirt on an equatorial dot in the Pacific, yet his soul of politeness would not permit a refusal.

The second glass did not give so serious a wrench to his convictions. The third still less.

Doctor Chitterly suddenly recalled that in the brave days of the Seventies when he was a young buck in the Mother Lode country of Plumas he was counted no slouch of a singer. He set his glass on a table, arose and motioned the orchestra to quiet. He caroled lustily:

In a valley—peaceful valley—of the mountings
Where twines the colum-bine,
A maiden—beut-chous maiden—had a——

The car floor arose in a mustang leap—plumped down. Crash of glass—a single wild call from harp strings. Darkness.

Doctor Chitterly and Spike were thrown together in a clawing heap when the car vaulted. For a half minute the latter was content to feel himself over for broken limbs, cursing volubly. Finally he managed to light a match. Its feeble flame revealed a narrow area of confusion: overturned tables, a guitar speared through the sounding board by a champagne bottle, one of the orchestra plucking fronds of palm from his collar.

The voice of the motorman called from up forward where the control platform was: “All right, gents! Just jumped the track an plowed into a sandbank. Soon's I can get the trolley pole over to the wire we'll have some light.”

The scrambled passengers did not await that event. Host, guests, musicians and colored attendant groped their way to the rear platform and so out into a clammy world of fog. Even the somnolent Iron Man, Walla-Walla, had been wrenched back to life by the accident.

A cursory hand-groping around the stalled car revealed more than a casual track-jumping. All the conductor's attempts to re-establish current connection by way of the trolley pole were vain. In brief, the palace car would stay there until a wrecking crew arrived.

“Where are we, Bill?” Spike Horn put the question to the motorman in a voice of restored good humor.

“Down below Ingleside, I guess,” the other answered.

“How long before a reg'lar car comes along to take us back to the city?”

“First car due here 'bout seven in the mornin'. Passed the last owl car back at No. 2 switch.”

“How far t' nearest telephone, Bill? Maybe we can catch a brace of hacks to come fetch the outfit into town.”

The motorman, hardly visible in the swirling smoke wreathes of fog, waved an indefinite direction down the track.

“Maybe half mile from here y'oughta hit the Four Corners. Wake up the little pill-roller whose red and yellow lamps burn all night. Me, I gotta stay with the car.”

Spike organized his relief expedition. The colored man refused to budge; no “prowlin' 'round” for him. One only of the five musicians consented to accompany Spike, the doctor and the Iron Man on the hunt for a 'phone. Promising the motorman that he would send in a call to the car barns for a wrecking crew, Spike and the three set out over the shifty footing of the sand between the rails.

A ghostly pilgrimage. The fog was pressing down so densely it entered the lungs like wood smoke—slightly stinging. To the left a suggested row of eucalyptus trees marched with them; a ghostly pat-pat of condensed moisture falling from their rags of foliage kept time to their pace. On the right an unseen cabbage field distilled a rancid odor. The sand clung to their feet like muck. Occasionally one of the quartette stubbed a toe on a projecting tie and pitched against a fellow before him.

They had progressed thus perhaps fifteen minutes away from the wrecked car when a vagrant gust of wind tore a rent in the fog curtain. For the space of half a minute a light shone, startlingly near, off in the direction of the odorous cabbages.

“That's our drugstore,” Spike shouted and turned abruptly down the bank upon which the rails ran. The others followed. They came to a barbed wire fence and scrambled under and over. Then the fog closed as suddenly as it had parted and the light was snuffed out.

“Well, anyway, we know where that light was,” Spike cheered and he kicked over a cabbage head with his first stride into the field. Then a neat game of guess-work: finding a place where a light had shone.

They blundered and they back-tracked. Once again the fog shredded to reveal a smear of yellow behind them. They about-faced for the new position. Suddenly a dog yapped in the gray fluff ahead. The sound of a slammed door came to their ears.

Spike, in the lead, plumped against a crazy picket fence, half fallen. Beyond that he could discern the dim outline of a house with ghostly finger dabs representing windows. But no light.

“I should say,” ventured Doctor Chitterly, “that whoever lives here was mighty unsociable. That light we saw was in one of windows not two minutes ago.”

A shaggy black dog came bullying out to bay and snap at their heels. Spike strode to the door, the others in a hesitant knot a few paces behind him.

The man from Goldfield thundered on the door with his fist. “Hey, inside there!” he challenged. Silence. He beat again with impatient knuckles.

“Open up in there!”

Suddenly came to the ears of the adventurers in the dooryard the pad-pad of running feet. They heard the dog, whom they had beaten off, vent a triumphant bay. Before they could turn in their tracks a half dozen shadowy shapes had swept down on them, coming around either corner of the house. These were the shapes of men carrying rifles.

A scream from the Italian musician as he turned to run. A rifle butt thudded on the back of his neck and he went down. After that no sound but the labored breathing of men in combat, fists against clubbed rifles and revolver butts short-hafted for hammer blows.

There could be but one result of so one-sided a struggle. In no time Spike Horn, the dizzy spender, a worthy vendor of Squaw Root Tonic, an Iron Man and a flute player were triced like fowls.

“Bring them inside the house,” commanded a voice as gentle as a woman's.