The Benevolent Liar/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
Well up, in the tops of the Sierras, surrounded by cañon and gorge, backed by rugged hills and peaks from some of which the snow never disappeared, dozed the fine old camp of Shingle. For fifty years it had been a camp, and it told mutely through its shaded streets that some of those who founded it had loved it and had faith in its future. Many of the ancient cabins and “store buildings,” erected from the downfall of its original forests, still stood, with moss-covered roofs and beautified by age, as a reminder of those who had built them, and whom they had outlasted. The original Main Street, tree-bordered, lay straight and true, and padding through its summer dust came the prospector and the rashly impetuous one, followed by three patient burros. The prospector admired vociferously the vista. The amateur robber admired his new friend. The burros admired nothing at all.
A stage with four obviously fresh horses tore to meet them, with jingling harness and rumbling wheels, and as it passed the little cavalcade the driver cracked his whip, grinned, and shouted “Hello, old-timer!” to which salutation Josh grinned, waved his hand through the cloud of gritty dust, and then said to his companion: “I see you got 'em all fussed up. They got one shotgun messenger outside and two in.” But the perturbed and repentant bandit failed to appreciate the joke and plodded doggedly ahead. The prospector's eyes twinkled.
“Tommy,” he said, “I ain't slept in a bed now for nigh onto three months, and I'm hankerin' for one—in a hotel. A sure-enough hotel, where they got a clerk with his hair greased good and slick and parted right down the middle. I got money enough to pay for both of us, and we'll put these pesky animals in a corral. Then, this evenin', me and you will take a stroll. Sabe?”
The robber did not, and showed it in his staring eye.
“How far is it to where you cached that clean-up?” queried Josh.
“About two miles.”
“Good! And the moon don't come up till about nine o'clock now, and that gives us a heap of time. Come on!”
“What is your plan?” Tom asked at last.
The prospector's eyes twinkled under his shaggy eyebrows as he recognized in his new protégé's question a further sign of anxiety.
“First,” he replied, “me and you'll find where Specimen Jones holds forth, and like as not there'll be a corral there for my friends.. After that—we'll take a paseo around the camp and see what she looks like, and—do some thinkin'.”
He trudged steadily forward and changed the topic, commenting on the board sidewalks, the tiny lawns, and struggling flower beds. Off in the distance, continuous wooden awnings and a well in the middle of the road betokened the business part of the village.
“By the great horn spoon! This is sure some camp, all right, all right! Looks like a sure-enough town,” Josh exclaimed, as eagerly as a boy faring into a great adventure. “Now that, I reckon, is a church. Hope she's a Baptist or a Methodist. I always like to go and see the sinners soused. And if that ain't a schoolhouse, I never saw one. Camp? This ain't no camp; it's 'most as big as Frisco! She's a town. No, she ain't; she's a city! A regular metteropawlis! Thousands of folks live here!”
“Nine hundred in the camp itself,” corrected Rogers.
“Nine hundred! Lordee! Some city!” exclaimed the prospector.
“But there are probably two thousand men working within a radius of four miles,” added his informant.
“Anyhow,” said Josh, with a long sigh, “she looks like nine hundred thousand to me, and—say, I'm glad I come here. Look how homelike she is! See all them signs down there? Them's saloons, or I cain't read. That's my favorite sort of a town. Churches for them that wants 'em. Schools to bring up real young Americans. Saloons for them that's thirsty. And I sure do hope they've got a gamblin' house or two for them that wants to do a little sportin' with old Miss Chance. If they've got them, too, this place is about as near paradise as a feller could wish for without bein' a hawg.”
“Yes, they've got them also,” enlightened Rogers. “But I don't gamble, and I don't drink. So I don't know much about them.”
“Neither do I! Neither do I!” was the prospector's cheerful response. “But I'm great on seein' every one happy and contented, I am. Now Hello! What's that? The stage and express office?”
He stopped abruptly and looked at a low, weather-beaten building that, unlike its next neighbor, was without a wooden awning and a well-whittled bench.
“Yes.”
“Um-m-mh That sort of suits me, too—that is, the way she's located,” he added enigmatically, and grinned his slow, quiet grin as he started forward again. He peered with his keen eyes right and left, ignored the sidewalk loafers who bestowed casual stares at them, and said nothing until they reached the well and trough in the middle of the street.
“Come on up, fellers, and have somethin' on me,” he invited his burros, as he seized the wooden pump handle and began to work it vigorously. “Here's to Shingle, fellers! Drink hearty!”
He worked the pump with one hand and by a considerable strain stretched his neck and bent his broad, lean shoulders around until his mustache and mouth intercepted the stream from the spout and assuaged his own thirst.
“Have some, Tommy?” he asked. But Rogers shook his head.
“Hey! Any of you men know where Specimen Jones lives?” he shouted to a group that lounged in front of a general-merchandise store.
“Sure,” responded a man in a blue flannel shirt and wearing a stained white hat at such an angle on the back of his head that it suggested juggling or necromancy to retain it in position. “Straight up to the end of the street, first trail to the left after the last house, only log cabin on the hillside with a corral.”
“Good work! Them's directions, pardner!” replied Josh, with an attempt at courtesy, and added, in a lower voice, to Rogers: “See! What did I tell you? Real folks live in this camp. All so kind and friendly and cheerfullike that it just makes a feller feel good to hear 'em talk. Come on, now; let's go up to Specimen's corral and get the packs off these fellers.”
All the way up the street he continued to voice his admiration. Everything—the day, the weather, the houses, the shade trees, and the birds therein—seemed to please him. He fell to whistling melodiously, reiterating the first bars of “Turkey in the Straw” with many a trill and flourish as evidence of his contentment. Awkwardly assisted by his companion, he removed the packs from the burros, who looked mildly astonished that the day's work was so soon done, gave each a caress and tweaked its long ears, then poked his head curiously into Jones' cabin.
“Humph!” he declared. “Specimen ain't changed none. He always was a mighty shiftiess cuss about keepin' his cabin right. Bet a dobe dollar this ain't never been scrubbed out.” But he did not enter, appearing to be eager to get back to the delights of what he regarded as a very attractive city. He looked thoughtfully at Rogers as they walked.
“I reckon you'd best go and get a new lid,” he remarked. “That one's a leetle too big, and somehow that canned milk ain't improved it none. Got any money?” he demanded, stopping in the trail. “No? Well, chop out them objections, son. I got plenty. Here! Let's go in back of this shed.”
He led the way, and proceeded to drag his shirt tail out and fumble at the fastenings of a belt around his lean loins. Releasing it, he squatted on the ground and extracted from one of the divisions a roll of currency that had been carried there so long that it was a mere flattened, stained mass. From it he carefully thumbed off twenty five-dollar bills. He brusquely silenced all of Rogers' objections with: “Shut up! I owed your dad a heap more than that when he died, and now I'm payin' a little of it back.” And it was a lie, for the elder Rogers had died owing him.
He replaced the belt, rearranged his shirt and trousers to suit his taste, and led the way down the main street. He halted with wide eyes in front of a clothing shop and said: “By Jiminy, but them's pretty clothes, ain't they? I u a checked suit like that once, and she was a daisy; but a woman I knew made fun of it, and so I had to give it away. 'Most busted my heart, though. Now, that one with the yellow stripes ought to look good on a young feller like you. Huh? No? You like that plain blue one? Well, every man to his taste. S'pose you go in and get that and kind of fuss yourself up a bit. I don't like to have nobody runnin' around the city with me that's—got a hole in the seat of his pants so big that a porous plaster couldn't patch it. That's a good feller. Put 'em on and Say! Better not buy new boots. Keep those. Sabe? You'll find me down the line here somewheres. So long.”
Josh walked happily down the street, staring in at every window and pausing before some of them with approval. He came to a halt in front of a place that bore the legend, “Prospector's Paradise,” said: “Looks first class,” stood on tiptoe in front of the swinging, wicker. doors, and from the six feet three inches thus attained, surveyed the interior.
“By crackey, pardner,” he remarked to the surprised proprietor, “it sure does look like its name.”
Some of the loungers inside laughed. Josh grinned cheerfully, and, on the proprietor's invitation, pushed against the doors and entered.
“That's a mighty fine lookin'-glass you got,” he exclaimed, staring at the bar fixtures, which were, after all, fairly good. “And what a shiny rail that is! Ain't solid silver, is she? See you got a pool table, too. And some right nice pictures. Well, well! This is sure some place!”
By this time the proprietor, nonplused and fearing that his place was about to be wrecked by an insane man, reached surreptitiously for a bung starter; but the prospector evidenced familiarity with the action by holding up a big red hand and exclaiming: “No offense, boss; no offense! I was in dead earnest. I'm a stranger in this camp.”
His grin was absolutely a declaration of peace, his next words a confirmation.
“Come on up, boys,” he called loudly. “Gather up and get acquainted with me. I'm Joshua Leander Price, who never done no man any harm, and ain't got no livin' enemies, and is fond of his feller men. Come to see if I can find anything around in these hills, ask no assistance, and just want to be friends. Do me the favor. And don't be bashful.”
They proved that they were not. One man only declined.
“I see you ain't drinkin', stranger,” Josh remarked, and every one drew a long, weary breath, as if expecting an outburst; but they were mistaken.
“That's right,” declared Josh. “I don't believe in drinkin' strong liquors myself. The strongest thing I ever drink is sody pop. Give the boys what they hanker after, but a little rosberry pop for mine,” he said to the proprietor, and then added, as if in explanation: “I likes the rosberry best because it's such an all-fired purty color.”
They told him they hoped he would like the camp, and, secretly amused, drank to his health.
“Yes, sir,” he said to the proprietor of the Paradise, as he put his glass down on the bar, “I don't believe in drinkin'—for myself. Just look at me!”
He stepped back, squared his broad shoulders, and inflated his great chest.
“Ain't never been sick a day in my life. Sixty-one year old and goin' on sixty-two. Don't know what an ache or a pain is. And I owe it all to the fact that I'm teetotal.”
The crowd around the bar grinned in good humor. It encouraged him.
“If everybody would drink sody, the same as me, and the saloons didn't sell nothin' but sody, most folks would be a heap sight better off. Liquor makes men fight. I never had a quarrel with anybody in my life. I don't see the use in fightin', nohow. And I'm honest enough to tell you men that I stand for 'most anything, because I'm afraid to fight. Don't believe in it, I don't. The Good Book says: 'A soft answer turneth away wrath.' Can't go back on that, can you? Well, when you drink nothin' but sody pop—I like rosberry the best—you don't want to fight.”
The proprietor of the Paradise stood in a daze. He threatened anger. But his new customer averted it by begging all hands present to smoke a “good seegar” with him, and this, too, was paid for.
“I orders seegars this time,” he said, “because I know that most of you men here wouldn't take a second drink if I asked you to. Do me the favor. Not a pain or an ache. Why, do you know, I never tasted beer nor spirits nor red liquor in all my life, and that's what makes me so all-fired healthy!”
Unobserved by him, the wicker screens from the street had swung open and shut again, and a man stood inside with a mild stare of astonished curiosity. But now, catching a view of Price's face in the mirror, he doubled over with delighted laughter. Josh turned with a scowl on his brows. The man straightened and came forward.
“Josh Price, sure as I'm alive! How are you, you old sour-dough ruffian? Oh, I heard you!” he added, as Josh, with a wide grin, seized the extended hand. “Never tasted liquor in your life—that's good! I've seen you when a barrel wouldn't satisfy your thirst—down in Mexico!”
Josh's grin did not in the least fade, nor was he abashed.
“Did I say I never tasted it?” he demanded. “Good heavens! I'm gettin' old, I am. Absent-minded. What I meant to say was, I hadn't tasted it for nigh onto six years, come this May, Hank. What are you doin' up this way, you mangy old coyote? Why, Hank, it's like old times to see you again! Now, I sure do like this camp.”
The men who had been playing pool resumed their game, the proprietor of the Paradise languidly began clearing up the glasses and polishing them, and Mr. Henry Williams explained that he was now the manager of a small but promising mine back up in the hills. Josh appeared to remember some errand he had to perform and shook hands with his newly found friend.
“See you later,” he called, moving toward the door with his long, steady stride. The screen swung outward and back into place.
“Sort of an amusing, harmless old chap,” commented the man behind the bar. Williams chuckled.
“Amusing, yes,” he said slowly, as he filled his pipe. “Harmless, no. He's just about as harmless as a ton of nitroglycerin balanced on top of a ladder. He can draw and shoot faster and truer than any man I ever knew or heard of. He can fight with both hands, kick with both feet, gouge, and bite. He can turn handsprings and somersaults in a rough-and-tumble and knock a man out every time he revolves. A pinwheel at a Fourth of July celebration is as slow as a land crab compared with him, and if there's anything on earth that he's afraid of and doesn't dare tackle, you can win a prize by taking it down to the Mexican border and displaying it to the awe-stricken and subdued citizens thereof!”
The proprietor of the Paradise stopped at the critical moment of wiping a long glass and betrayed his astonishment.
“It's true,” asserted the manager of the mine. “And you just pass the word around that he's about the last man that's ever come to this camp to pick a fight with. It'd have to be picked, because he doesn't hunt trouble, and will stand a lot; but when he turns loose, take my tip and hit for the brush, fast and hard.”
And in the meantime Josh had traveled onward, found a few more old acquaintances, and comfortably installed himself on the well-shaded porch of the City Hotel, where he expectantly awaited his protégé. Another man sauntered up, glanced at him sharply, and then smiled and came forward.
“Hello, Josh!” he hailed, and to the prospector's unrestrained delight, proved to be another friend, but of different stamp. The latest was Frank Barnes, a man with a closely trimmed white beard and steady, dark eyes, who explained that he owned a prosperous mine a short distance from the camp, and had his home in the town. They were talking quietly, indeed seriously for Josh, when Tom Rogers appeared, clad in his new attire, and. was thereupon introduced.
“I have seen you before, it seems to me,” commented Barnes, frankly staring at him.
“Yes, I worked here at one time,” Rogers replied.
“And now him and me are in partnership,” Josh added, much to Tom's astonishment.
“Wasn't your father Bill Rogers, who used to be down in Tucson?”
“The same,” assured Josh.
“And a very good man, too; we were warm friends,” said Barnes, eying Tom keenly. “I wish you success.”
He stopped abruptly and turned as a girl of about twenty years of age came hurrying toward them, and his face lighted with a warm expression.
“This is my daughter, Edith, just home from an Eastern seminary,” he said to Josh, who promptly thrust out his huge fist and introduced Rogers.
The latter felt suddenly embarrassed. He was still the culprit; repentant, it was true, but with danger hanging above his head. His conscience stabbed now that he was thus brought face to face with a girl who, he acknowledged to himself, was the most attractive he had ever seen. He felt that by one reckless act he had cut himself off irrevocably from such as she. He surmised that she was of the type that he most admired, the self-confident girl who loved out-of-doors. Her white hat, daintily dented, her trim, short skirt, her new riding gauntlets, her high tan. shoes, her mannish, simple blouse with its plain collar and tie, and the sun tan of her face told it all. Her eyes, a violet so deep as to appear dark in any save the full light, were open and candid. Her lips, cleanly cut and well curved, with corners suggesting a readiness to laugh or to be firm, did not belie the strength of her chin and round, white throat. Her hair, blond and heavy, was a trifle disarranged as if she had but come from a ride. He stood to one side with unaccustomed awkwardness until, with a cheerful nod to him, she accompanied her father down the street, leaving the prospector to. pass more enthusiastic comments on the discovery of another old-time friend.
“This camp,” he declared, “is just like comin' home from somewhere a long way off. I knew a lot of the Tucson boys had drifted up here, because I used to hear about 'em once in a while; but I didn't have no idea there was so many. Now, Tommy, I've taken a room for you here, too, No. 27. Just make yourself at home, same as me. We pay for these chairs out here on the porch, just like drummers or owners or any other nabobs. We put our feet on the railin' the same as them, and spit over it the same as them.”
He stopped and stared at Tom and then added, in a gruff rumble scarcely audible a few feet away: “I'm tellin' you this so's you'll quit lookin' like a dog in a pound, or a man that's a-runnin' away from a jail. Ain't you got any nerve? Well, if you have, leave it to your Uncle Josh and stick your chin up. They ain't got you yet, and they ain't a-goin' to.”
It was after the sun had set, and the streets were filled with loungers who discussed the robbery of the Horseshoe clean-up, and the admitted failure of the posse to capture the thief, that Josh beckoned to Rogers and said: “Well, come on. Time we was goin'. We got to go and get that stuff and turn it over so's you can be a clean man again.”
Outside the camp, they talked more freely.
“What I'm up to,” he said, “is this: We'll get that stuff, sneak it down here to the camp, lay outside till about midnight, when things is quiet, then go down to that express office, bust a winder open, and chuck it inside. I printed a note on brown paper this afternoon that goes with it. Here it is. Want to read it?”
Rogers took the paper and in the dusk deciphered the painstaking characters:
Gold from the Horseshoe mine. Borrowed over night in the hope that old Vance who owns it will die of heart bust or else get the aforesaid heart cracked so itll spill onct in a while and may the Lord have mercy on his soul when he croaks.
“You see,” Josh explained, “that'll make the camp think it was all a joke. We gets the clean-up through the winder, then we rings the express agent's bell. He lives upstairs. I found out to-day. He comes down, but we ain't there. We're up on the line, watchin' some game, and I makin' noise enough so folks'll think I've been there all the time, loadin' up on sody pop.”
To him the conception seemed one of rare merit, a great intrigue, involving wonderful acumen. He was as proud of it as a man could be who had discovered a way to reach the moon. He chuckled and beat Tom on the back with great glee. But Tom was only too anxious to have the load off his mind and willing to adopt any means. He saw in this restitution a chance to undo his frightful blunder, committed in an insane outburst, and to begin over again.
“Good!” he said quietly. “I don't care how it goes back, just so it does. I didn't realize that” He threatened to break down, and the prospector patted him kindly on the back.
“It's all right, son,” he said. “You did a fool trick; but I'm goin' to get you out of it. I sort of reckon that the Lord Almighty ain't holdin' up a grudge against a man when he just makes a mistake.”
The darkness closed upon them, lighted only by early stars shining through the high spaces and clean air. The road stretched dim and winding before them. They trudged silently forward for a long time, each absorbed in thought, until Tom caught his companion by the arm and whispered: “It's just around that bend ahead. If we cut across here we shall come to a pile of rocks. I would know them if it were darker than it is; I made sure of my landmarks.”
They walked cautiously from the trail, Tom in the lead with outstretched hands to pull aside the tangles of brush and briers that sometimes barred his advance. Both were leaning forward and peering into the night.
“This is it,” mumbled Tom. “Right here. This big pile with a scrub pine on top. It's in a line right under that. There is a round bowlder just my height, and in its foot there's a crevice and a hole. I put the gold in that and pulled the brush over.”
“Go ahead,” was all he heard, and still as frontiersmen can be from training and habit, they slipped forward. Tom stopped and dropped to his knees, fumbled with his hands, and then barely suppressed an exclamation of despair.
“Why—why, it's not there!” he gasped. “Some one has been here! The brush has been pulled away!”
He leaned forward and thrust his hand into the hole. He was like a man seized with a chill, and straightened himself back to a sitting posture while his hands were still outstretched.
“Sure this is the place?” the prospector whispered in his ear.
“Certain! Quite certain!” he declared hoarsely.
“S-s-sh!” came the warning whisper, and the prospector crawled in front of him and thrust his own hands into a cavity. It was empty.
Suddenly he lifted up a trifle, caught Rogers by the shoulder, and pulled him downward. He wriggled forward as if the night itself might hear, and whispered hurriedly: “Keep still! Crawl back on your belly, and don't make a sound! Don't let a twig crack under you! Some one has found this stuff, and it's ten to one they're layin' out around here tryin' to nab us.'
With painful deliberation and caution they silently retreated from off the gray rocks that, on a lighter night, would have exposed their presence. They suppressed their breathing painfully, each sound being magnified to their ears. They reached the undergrowth, and, side by side, lifted their heads from the earth and listened. Not a sound was audible.
“Come back down to the road,” whispered the prospector, and again they crawled. cautiously for a long and strained interval. They came to it at last more than two hundred yards from the place where the bullion had been concealed, and got to their feet.
“It told you the truth! That was where I hid it!” asserted Rogers, as if he had been accused of a lie.
“No use to say that,” gruffly replied the prospector, in a low rumble. “I believe you, boy. You wouldn't lie to me, I know. Only—who the deuce do you suppose found it?”
He sat on a bowlder by the roadside and pondered, while Tom, with all his hopes dashed earthward, stood dumb. It was as if the chance to begin again and redeem himself had been torn from his hands. He was hopeless. Looking up, the prospector read the dejection in his attitude and got slowly to his feet.
“Tommy,” he said, in the same low undertone, “don't be cut up about it. If the sheriffs didn't get it, some Piute has stumbled on it. If so, it's up to us to find him, make him shell out, and square the account. You go back to the hotel and wait in my room for me to come. I'm goin' back.”
Josh waited a few minutes after the younger man's departure, then began a cautious exploration, his real object being to learn whether any one was watching the cache. With the adroitness of a Blackfoot Indian, and as silent, he made detours around the central point, pausing now and then to listen, or to reassure himself that any slight noise was meaningless. Emboldened, he proceeded more rapidly, until convinced that no menace was at hand, after which he walked to the pilfered cache, and, shading a match in his hat, closely examined it.
There was the proof that Tom had not lied; for some one, in removing the heavy bullion, had been compelled to drag it over the moist earth, thus leaving a distinct trail. Cautiously, burning match after match, the prospector scanned the spots of sparse earth. He gave a little grunt when he picked up a trousers button and slipped it into his pocket. He found a clean, distinct footprint at one place where the moist, sandy loam lent itself to the imprint, and for a long time studied it, using match after match.
Rendered more confident by the fact that he had not been disturbed, he proceeded to lay a little blaze of twigs by the light of which he made careful measurements of his new clew, using for the purpose a scaled rule on the back of the hoof pick in his knife. Having neither pencil nor paper, he found a slab of slate, scratched thereon a copy of the shoe print and his figures. This task completed, he searched the other side of the bowlder, and paused, astonished by finding another shoe print. He bent farther over and made another pile of twigs and lighted them to assure himself that the flash of his match had not been deceitful.
There was no doubt of it! Sharp and distinct, and evidently made either at the same time or at nearly the same time as the man's mark, was the clear impression of a woman's shoe, small, compact, and advancing toward the cache from that side of the rock. He found two others leading away from it and studied them carefully, seeming to draw some conclusion therefrom. He reversed his slate tablet and again took measurements that he recorded with painstaking fidelity. His tablet he wrapped carefully in his big bandanna handkerchief, slipped it into the pocket of his blue flannel shirt, trampled the fire out, and stood thoughtfully for a full minute before moving. Then he dropped to his knees and gathered every particle of charred twig and even some of the earth beneath in his hands filled his hat with this evidence. Carefully he obliterated not only his own footprints, but the others that he had found, working on hands and knees.
He crawled around to where he had lighted his first little blaze, added its refuse to his hat, and swept away the print of the man's step. He worked with patient thoroughness until certain that not a trace was left anywhere around the gray bowlder.
For the distance of a mile he carried his hat in the hollow of his arm before leaving the road to dump his burden into the undergrowth. He dusted the hat carefully, clapped it on his head, and, as he resumed his way toward Shingle, whistled softly as if he had not a care in the world.