The Benevolent Liar/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
MR. JOSHUA LEANDER PRICE, known in parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Chihuahua as Josh Ananias Price, dumped a handful of some black stuff he called “kawfy” into the water that boiled in a battered old pot, and with the deftness of long experience, put it at the edge of his camp fire to simmer, after which he poured some batter into an equally ancient and veteran frying pan preparatory to making a few “flapjacks” for his breakfast. He paused to flip a live coal off the bacon that kept warm in a tin plate, to throw a pebble at a burro that was trying to gnaw a hole in a meal sack, and to bawl: “Git outa that! You, Pete! You're the worst dag-goned specimen of a thief I ever did see. I'll sure bust your gosh-durned back if you don't keep away from them things!”
The burro, one of three that loafed about at the foot of the little cliff in the Sierras where Josh had camped overnight, merely dodged the pebble, shook his long ears, and laughed. He had reason to, for his owner was notorious for bloodthirsty threats, but peaceful intentions. But all further threats that Josh might have made, or other pebbles that he might have thrown, were forgotten in the next instant, when, with a startled yell, and with frying pan in hand, he leaped wildly to one side and ran a few yards before turning. A rumbling crash in the brush above, a startled exclamation, and a downpour of shale accompanied a stranger in his descent. He rolled through the brush at the edge of the little cliff, grabbed desperately at every bush that promised succor, bounded over the first little ledge, rolled and twisted toward the second, took a nine-foot drop into the camp fire, upset the coffee and the bacon, and scattered brands in all directions.
He came to a full stop, seated, and with the bewildered air of a man who speculates as to whether he is yet alive. He rubbed a mop of black hair and tentatively felt a slight wound on his scalp that was leaking blood. He looked at his ensanguined fingers with a puzzled expression, brushed a threatening coal from his trousers, and felt his feet, which the prospector observed were bootless and covered with socks much the worse for wear.
“Great Scott! Young feller,” remarked Josh, approaching him, while the batter for his intended flapjack dripped in a little white rivulet from the edge of the frying pan, “do you most always come down a mountain that-a-way? You do seem to be in an all-fired big hurry.”
A pair of blue-gray eyes lifted themselves up to his and became suddenly alive to their surroundings. Then abruptly the young man turned over on his hands and knees and looked giddily back up over his trail through the brush. Something about his appearance transfixed the prospector with surprise, but he quickly concealed his emotion.
“I thought—I thought I was a goner—up there!” the young man said, as he more fully recovered from the shock. “I” He climbed to his feet stiffly as if he had sustained many bruises not inventoried, and replied, with a mirthless grin: “Of course not! Of course I don't always come down that way. I slipped and—here I am!”
“Gee whiz! But you was comin' some! Nothin' busted, I hope?” said Josh solicitously.
The young man stretched and tested one limb after another, seemed reassured, then suddenly scowled and answered: “No, I'm all right. Where does that trail go?”
“Down on to the road,” replied the prospector, with an odd look in his eyes. “The road that runs to Shingle Flats. Why? You ain't a stranger hereabouts, are you?”
“Not exactly,” said the young man hesitantly. “I—well, I used to run around these hills some when I was a boy.”
“Humph! That wasn't very long ago, was it? You don't look more'n twenty-two or three now.”
“Twenty-five,” corrected the visitor, again staring back up the mountainside as if contemplating a return whence he had come.
“Had any breakfast?” queried Josh, returning to the fire and kicking the scattered embers back into a heap. “Ain't no use in bein' in a rush. Good Lord! You've already cost me one pan of bacon and the makin's of one flapjack. Might as well stick around and make it more.”
“My—my hat and boots are up there and” lamely objected the visitor, who was evidently more than hungry.
“Hat? Most times 1 don't bother about 'em; but every man has his own ways of lookin' at things,” Josh interrupted. “If you cain't eat without a hat, I'll just naterally lend you one, and I'll lend you some boots, too, to climb up and get yours. Ain't no good climbin' rocks barefooted. Also it's hard on a feller's socks, if he has any.”
He dived at the grub box, took out the bacon, some beans, a can of condensed milk that had been opened and therefore had leaked, and from the bottom produced what he called a hat. He proceeded to wipe the condensed milk and some stray sugar off with the sleeve of his shirt.
“There!” he said triumphantly. “There's some hat. She's a good one. Wore it myself, off and on, for 'most four years. I'll get the boots out of a pack. Um-m-mh! Here they are. My best ones, too. Big for you, but Now sit down there, boy, and pretty soon me and you'll have some chuck that'll make you forget all about tumblin' down the hillside. Besides, I—feel like talkin' to you.”
The stranger looked tempted, though undecided, but accepted the hat.
“What's your name when you're home?” Josh asked, with pretended carelessness, as he cut some strips of bacon with a sheath knife that he took from his belt.
“Rogers—Tom Rogers,” the younger man answered absently; and if the prospector had not been looking at the slices of bacon, he might have observed something furtive in the way Rogers—Tom Rogers—frowned over the tops of the pine trees toward the trail below, then looked back up the hillside, as if still in doubt what course to pursue.
“Um-m-mh! Good name, too,” commented Josh, as he held the long-handled frying pan above the blaze. “S'pose you get some fresh kawfy goin' there. You certainly put a dent in my pot—comin' down the hill, hoofs foremost, the way you did. Lucky she's a good pot. Bought her 'most two years ago. Give six bits for her. Kawfy's in the grub box somewheres. Um-m-mh! Rogers, eh? Good name, Rogers is.”
He gave another scrutinizing glance at his guest; but the latter, as 1f doubt had given way to decision, was already seeking the coffee.
“Now, son, you just sit over there with your back against that wall you fell over, and me and you'll have a sure-enough feed,” the prospector said, when his preparations were complete, and Rogers obeyed after another sidelong glance toward the trail. Evidently, from the way he plied his fork and knife, he was famished; but if the shrewd old man squatted opposite him observed this fact, he did not comment on it, although his eyes twinkled now and then as he lifted them in the act of hoisting huge chunks of bacon or flapjacks into his leathery mouth.
“That's better,” he said, with a satisfied gulp, as he straightened out his long, drooping mustache and prepared to roll a cigarette. “Finish her up, boy! Finish her up! There's a couple more of them prime cakes there, and a strip of bacon that I ain't calculatin' to feed to the burros or pack to the next camp.”
Rogers accepted, and appeared more at ease when his hunger was satisfied.
“Its right decent of you,” he said gratefully, “to take me in this way—considering how I upset your breakfast when I came.”
“Everybody's welcome here in my house,” responded Josh, waving his hand around in a circular gesture, indicating that everything in sight—the ragged hills, the forests, and the blue sky—were his abode. “Grub and hospitality's about the only two things I ain't stingy with. And they're about all I've got to give, too,” he added, with a chuckle. “I ain't exactly”
He paused, and his eyes opened a little wider. His hearing, rendered acute by a life passed in the lonesome places, where each sound is noted, had caught a sharp, staccato drumming of horses' hoofs, and this was instantly followed by men's voices as the riders came abruptly around a bend in the road below, where a sheer cliff on one side and a deep cañon on the other had cut off the sounds of approach.
Rogers, with a sharp exclamation, leaped to his feet, his tin plate with its contents falling to his feet. There was no mistaking his fear and intent. He was planning to run, but the plan was carried no farther.
“You sit down there, just like you was, and be mighty quick about it!”
His host's voice lost its leisurely, careless drawl and became sharp and peremptory. Also his host exhibited another menacing change, inasmuch as his words were accompanied by one swift movement that brought a worn and heavy pistol from a belt and into line with his guest's head. Rogers shrank back against the wall with that air of desperation which overtakes the cornered animal.
“Sit down, you fool!” the prospector again ordered. “I'm runnin' this show. Be quick about it! Pick that tin up and go on with the eatin'!”
The younger man, seeing that to disobey was to court a more imminent danger than any other that menaced him, slowly obeyed. The voices on the road below became audible.
“Smoke up there on the hillside. Whoa!” they heard one man say, and then the voice of another: “Some of us better go up and find out what it is.”
“Hello, down there!” the prospector shouted, without turning his head or shifting his eyes from Rogers, whose face had blanched and whose hands holding the plate shook nervously.
Voices answered in a scattered shout, and the brush beside the trail crashed as some of the riders turned their horses' heads upward.
“For the love of Heaven,” Rogers appealed, in a strained voice, “give a man a chance, can't you? Let me go!”
“You sit still and go right on with that eatin',” Josh rumbled back. “And they ain't no need for you to look as if you'd just bit a man on the leg and was ashamed of it.”
With that same surprising quickness, he slipped his pistol back into the ragged old leather holster just as the foremost riders broke through the brush and came forward on their panting, sweating mounts. It was too late for Rogers to attempt flight. There was nothing for him to do but obey the prospector's order and at least try to eat. It was but a sorry pretense, and yet that same desperation assisted him to make an effort.
“Mornin'! Some decent weather we're havin', eh?”
The prospector's voice had resumed the same unperturbed drawl when he addressed the newcomers.
“Great Scott! What's up?” it added. “Look as if you'd been comin' from somewhere in a hurry.”
“We're trying to pick up a man that stuck up the Horseshoe gold wagon last night and got away with a clean-up,” explained the rider nearest Price, as he threw himself from his saddle and stared first at him and then at the man with the plate on his knees. The others were appraising the three burros, the grub box, and all the familiar outfit of the veteran prospector.
“Psho!” replied Josh, getting to his feet. “Stuck up the How much did the feller get?”
“About five hundred ounces,” answered the spokesman. “And he came this way. We lost the trail back up on the barrens, about two miles behind here, and it wasn't very good going at any place. Who are you fellows?”
“Good Lord!” said the prospector plaintively. “I thought everybody knowed me. I'm”
“Old Josh Price, or I'm a liar!” interrupted another man, who had followed the others up from the trail. “Well, you old horned toad! Where'd you blow in from?”
“Dear me! If it ain't Specimen Jones, I'll eat my outfit!” responded the prospector, hastening to a handclasp with the latest arrival. “I ain't seen you for four or five years. Not since Say, mebbe you could find your way around that town of Needles now! I guess not! She's a city, Specimen. A sure-enough town! Doc Booth's been elected sheriff of old San Berdoo, and Hey! This ain't the place you wrote me about, is it? The place you said was promisin'? It don't look none too much good to me, so far.”
“Why, you old mule, you ain't come to nothin' yet! Shingle Flats ten mile from here.”
Jones proceeded to introduce Josh to all the others of the party as an old-time partner and friend who was “sure some good miner,” and Josh dolefully regretted that he had nothing to prove hospitality. He seemed suddenly to recall the object of their visit and said: “Who'd you say this feller was that stuck up the gold wagon?”
They grinned and swore, explaining, in the meantime, that they would like that information themselves; but, in view of the fact that the bandit was masked and had cleared away so expeditiously, they had no idea of his identity.
“Too bad,' sympathized Josh, with a wag of his head. “Me nor Tom, here, ain't--- Lordee, but I'm a sure impolite old cuss! Forgot to introduce you to my pardner. This is young Tom Rogers, boys, and he's a right good pardner, too—considerin' that he ain't much more'n a kid. Tom, come and show the gentlemen you ain't forgot how to shake hands since you been trainin' under me.”
Rogers got to his feet and shook gravely all around, but with such an air of embarrassment that the prospector felt called upon to apologize for him.
“Bashfullest cuss I ever did see!” he commented. “Always been that way. But he's all right. You boys'll like him. Now, we been here all night, and we ain't seen nor heard nothin' nor nobody. If that stick-up come past us in the night he must have done it mighty quiet, because one of them burros of ours, that old white devil over there, is a regular watchdog. First he brays loud enough to wake the dead, then he comes rushin' up to me and says: 'Hey! Git up, Josh!' and starts in to tell me what he saw. 'Most always it's somethin' that don't amount to nothin', and I cusses and goes back to my blankets. And last night he said nothin' at all.”
Already the man hunters were showing signs of restlessness.
“That settles it,” declared one. “The feller we're after either kept up on the high places, or else he dropped over the divide the other way. I think some of us better keep on down the road, and the others go back up to the Deacon's Trail, cross the ridge, and take down the other cañon.”
“Good! That's right!” came a chorus of approval, as the party remounted.
“See you up at Shingle,” Specimen Jones bawled over his shoulder. “If you fellers get there before I do, Josh, make yourselves at home in my cabin. Ain't no lock on my door, and there's a jug under the bunk. Stay there till I get home. Want to talk over old times.”
“Good! We'll be there,” asserted the prospector. “I was headin' for you. Hope you catch that tinhorn that you're after and decorate a tree with him.”
His voice rose in a crescendo due to the needs of widening distance as the party rode away, and Specimen Jones' voice trailed back: “No, nothin' like that! The sheriff's here with us, and” The remainder was lost. The sounds on the trail below died away in hasty turmoil and clatter as the posse divided on its new project. A jay bird that had been trying to make itself heard resumed the effort with better success, and Rogers dropped limply back against the rocks of the cliff and stared at the prospector, who eyed him steadily.
“Well, Tom Rogers,” Josh said quietly, “what for did you go and rob that Horseshoe layout? Ain't no use in your lyin' to me, you know, because I know you done it. I hates a liar, unless he's lyin' about somethin' that's worth while, and then I bank on him. I reckon it's up to you to give it to me straight, with nothin' but the plain truth, after which, bein' as I'm goin' to sit as judge and jury on this case, I'll decide what I ought to do about you.”
“How do you know I robbed it?” demanded Rogers, lowering his eyes.
“Because I do. How do I know you ain't a professional robber? By the way you acted. What makes me think maybe it's the first time you ever did rob one? Because you was in a panic. Why did they lose the trail? Because likely you remembered a half sole or a patch on your boots and got rid of 'em, landin' here in your worn socks. The minute I saw the soles of 'em, I knew you were runnin' away from somethin'. And that ain't all.
“See here, young Tom Rogers, I'll tell you somethin' else: You're a natural-born fool! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, if ever a man was. You! Tom Rogers! A son of old Bill Rogers, who was as white a man as ever made each day he lived an honest one, and, when his time come, probably walked right up to God Almighty, looked Him square in the face and said: 'Lord, I've come, and I ain't afraid, because I done my best. And now I've come home.'”
As he spoke, all his homely awkwardness was suddenly garbed in dignity. The rough, careless drawl had given way to a stern, uncompromising earnestness, and his eyes probed sharply, relentlessly. The culprit turned white, and his lips trembled. He gulped and looked at the ground until surprised by the latter portion of his protector's speech.
“You—you—knew my father!” he stammered.
“Knew him? Of course I did. Knew him for twenty years. Knew your mother that died when you was a baby. Could almost have sworn you was my old pardner's boy before you ever opened your mouth to tell me your name. You're the dead spit of him. In all but one thing. All but one! Bill Rogers never did a man out of a penny in his life, and—Heaven pity him!—would turn his poor, tired old bones over in his Mexican grave if he knew that his only son—the one he slaved to educate—was nothin' more than a dirty, no-account, pestiferous thief! I kept 'em from gettin' you. Do you know why?”
He walked around the edge of the camp fire and up to the figure that appeared to shrink and flatten itself against the gray wall of rock, and shook a gnarled finger in Rogers' face. He spoke in a voice that was softened with pent feeling: “I was with your dad when he died. I buried him—buried him with these hands! I heard the last words he ever said. He said to me: 'Josh—look after him—help him—do what you can do for my Tom. Be a father to him, and a friend, if he needs one.' I promised; but he died while tryin' to give me your address, and I couldn't find you. I'm here now. And I'm goin' to do what I'd want any one to do with a son of mine in this fix. I didn't let em have you. Why? Because it wasn't up to me to see old Bill's son go out on the end of a rope. I'd rather try you myself, and then if I found you guilty, make you walk up on the hillside, there above, give you a last chance to square it with the Lord Almighty, and then put a bullet through your skull. My boy—son of the man I loved—it's up to you now to talk straight. There ain't nothin' standin' between you and a half-decent death but what you can say for yourself, and I'm the judge.”
The holdup looked at him with perturbed eyes, but saw no hope through appeal. The prospector was as inflexible and cold as the mountain itself. One of the burros was nosing around the grub box, an intrusion that at any other time would have provoked a volley of objurgation and swift punishment, but now was unheeded. The culprit felt that he was actually on trial, and his knees weakened. He sat slowly down on a convenient bowlder in an attitude of helpless dejection.
“Yes, I robbed the wagon,” he said huskily. “But—it was the first time I ever stole a cent from anybody.”
“Point one for the defense,” growled Price, without a sign of softening. “Go on. What made you do it? Just pure cussedness?”
“No, it wasn't!” retorted Rogers, with a show of spirit. “If they didn't owe me something, nobody on earth ever will! They robbed my father. He called that mine the Washoe, and”
“Oh! Hold on a minute! The Washoe, eh? So they gave her a new name? I knew about the Washoe. Your father told me. It was a steal. Cash Vance got that property by bribin' a couple of perjurers to help him, and jumpin' the claim, takin' it to the higher courts, and Yes, they busted your dad, all right. He couldn't hire any good attorneys, and”
He stopped and for a long time contemplated the ground at his feet, while Tom Rogers, encouraged, watched him. And then the fugitive abandoned reserve and spoke as one confessing, seeking sympathy, and with a desperate desire to clear himself.
“I was in a San Francisco school when my father died,” he said impetuously, “and the first I knew of his death was when the head master came to me and told me that father hadn't remitted, and-asked if I knew the reason why. Father didn't write to me very often. It had been six months since I had heard from him, and—I was worried. I wrote to his last address, at Nogales, and the letter came back. Scrawled across the envelope was: 'Died last November, over by Tinto.'”
He stopped for a moment, as if thinking of that crisis, while the prospector nodded affirmation and said: “That's right. He did. Well?”
“I wanted to become a mining engineer. I didn't know what to do. I wrote the postmaster at Nogales for information, and he wrote back that my father left nothing. So I had to quit school and go to work. I worked two years to get enough to go to Berkeley for one year, and then had to quit again. I worked another year, but had bad luck, and you see I didn't know enough of anything to get steady work, and the times were hard. Then I went to Alaska, and had no luck. I came back and tried to get work and couldn't. I was desperate, I walked up here to Shingle and went to the Horseshoe and got a chance to talk to Vance. I told him who I was and that my father was dead, and all about how I wanted to finish my education, and—tried to borrow enough money from him to carry me through.”
He uttered the finishing sentence in a suppressed, hesitant voice, as if ashamed of a past weakness.
“And he wouldn't let you have it—old Vance, who stole a fortune from your daddy?” Price's voice denoted sympathy.
“No! Him? He laughed at me and told me to get out of his office. That he wasn't running an orphans' home, and had no use for anything that had ever been connected by birth or otherwise with my father.”
“Um-m-m-mh! What then?”
“Well, I—I got angry at that, and hit him. He yelled like a kicked dog. A bookkeeper and another man ran in and piled onto me. They were helped by a yardman, because, you see, I'm pretty strong. They broke one of my ribs, and--- Oh, well, it doesn't matter about all that! When I recovered consciousness, I was lying beside the road, with dried blood all over my face, and so weak I could hardly crawl to a stream below and A teamster named Tim Jordan, a very old man, and very kindly, too, found me, and”
“Good old Tim!” interjected Josh.
“He brought me down to Shingle and made me stay at his cabin until I got better, and then loaned me money enough to send for my trunk, and I got a job as swamper over at the Glory Mine. Old Vance saw me on the street down at Shingle the first time I was off shift, and he went to the boss at the Glory and told him I was a crook and that if he kept me around the mine he ought to double lock his safe. This boss, Mike Corrigan, was a pinhead who wanted to curry favor with Vance in the hope of getting something at the Horseshoe some time, so he called me in and gave me my time. Then I got a job in the office at the Lady Ellen Mine, and Vance discovered me there two days later. He owns stock in the Lady Ellen. Is one of the directors, I think. So he got me fired again. That was the finish. I gave up trying to do anything up here on the Big Divide, and pulled out for Keswick. I couldn't get a thing to do. They were laying off men. I went from one place to another, trying to find work, until my money was gone. Then—well, I got sore. There didn't seem to be any place on earth for me, while this man that robbed my father had everything. And so—I came back and Yes, I did hold up the pay wagon when it was coming down to Shingle to turn a clean-up over to Wells-Fargo.”
The judge of the open-air court got to his feet and walked slowly backward and forward over the little slope of mountain grass as if mightily perturbed by all he had heard, and finally came to a full stop in front of the plaintiff as if reaching a decision.
“You've heard that old thing about two wrongs not makin' a right, ain't you?” he asked.
The plaintiff nodded a sullen assent.
“Well, where's the clean-up you stole?”
Rogers winced a trifle, as if recalled to the fact that he had become a thief.
“I buried it under a bowlder not a dozen yards from where I stopped the wagon,” he replied.
“Um-m-m-mh! I see.”
The walk was resumed in thoughtful silence. Josh rolled another cigarette, lighted it with economical care from a dying ember, puffed vigorously, and, when it was burned down to the peril of his drooping, white mustache, threw it away and squatted opposite his prisoner. A coarse lock of white hair fell across his eyebrows and seemed to annoy him. He threw off his battered old hat and carefully combed his hair with his fingers as if intent on preserving his toilet.
“All right, so far,” he said. “But what I want to know is, how you feel about it, now that you've cooled off and seen what an all-fired mess you've got yourself into.”
Tom Rogers was palpably distressed by the question. He stared moodily at a distant mountaintop and shook his head.
“It's pretty bad,” he confessed boyishly. “I was sore. I didn't care so much for the money, after all, I think, as I did to get even with old Vance. When I thought of all he had done to my father and to me, I—well, I wanted to play even with him. Just once!”
The prospector looked at him with eyes that had regained their quiet, tolerant humor, and grinned.
“After all,” he said thoughtfully, “you're nothin' but a boy. Bill's boy, too. But, you see, you went about things the wrong way. I'd have a heap more respect for you, and so would every man on the Divide, if you'd waited till you got well, given Vance a right good beatin', paid your fine or served your time in jail, and then toddled off about your business. Robbin' a stage or a train or a pay wagon, in California, happens to have but one punishment, which is hangin'.”
He paused for another moment, scowled meditatively at the nearest burro that cropped steadily at the short mountain grass, and added judicially: “That bullion has got to go back.”
“But you don't know Vance. That wouldn't square it up with him!” exclaimed Rogers.
“It sure will—the way we'll do it,” asserted Josh, with his habitual, lazy smile. “Square it up? We'll hand Shingle camp a laugh that'll make it impossible for old Vance to ever refer to that there subject again. And I reckon you'd be sort of glad to get the whole thing off your conscience, wouldn't you, Tommy?” he asked, betokening by his friendly and familiar freedom with nomenclature his forgiveness.
“I would; you can be sure of that!” fervently replied the culprit.
“All right. It goes.” The prospector stopped and assumed a whimsically judicial air. “This here court, havin' heard all the evidence, and believin' it, hereby acquits the aforesaid whereas prisoner, Tommy Rogers, and by the same token constitutes itself guardian for the aforeas Tommy Rogers, because he, bein' a natural-born fool, needs one if ever anybody did. Court's adjourned.”
He got to his feet and turned his back, pretending to busy himself with picking up his camp outfit, also to keep from looking at the man he had tried and certainly would have executed under other circumstances. Also because he wished to avoid the culprit's expressions of gratitude that were promptly silenced. But he blinked his own eyes with steady persistence under a storm of mental ridicule, and called back over his shoulder gruffly: “Come on, lad! Earn your breakfast and the one you spoiled by helpin' me break camp. You and me's got to be movin'.”
And young Rogers, freed from immediate fear, found himself obedient and anxious to earn his new guardian's. approval.