Kitabı oku: «The Treasure Trail: A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine», sayfa 3
“Yep, and I carpentered the first one, and it wasn’t so bad at that! Now child, if you will pass the lemons, and Kit will pass the decanter of amber, and someone else will rustle some water, I’ll manufacture a tonic to take the dust out of your throats.”
“Everybody works but father,” laughed Billie as the Chinaman sliced and served the venison, and Tia Luz helped supply all plates, and then took her place quietly at the lower end of the table and poured the strong fragrant coffee.
Rhodes spoke to her in Spanish, and her eyes lit up with kindly appreciation.
“Ah, very good!” she commented amicably. “You are not then too much Americano?”
“Well, yes, I’m about as American as you find them aside from the Apache and Pima and the rest of the tribes.”
“Maybe so, but not gringo,” she persisted. “I am scared of the Apache the same as of El Gavilan, and today my heart was near to stop going at all when we lose señorita and that black horse–and I say a prayer for you to San Antonio when I see you come fetch her home again.”
“Yes, the black horse is valuable,” remarked Billie. “Huh! I might as well be in a convent for all I get to see of the ranges these late days. If anyone would grubstake me, I’d break loose with Cap here and go prospecting for adventures into some of the unnamed ranges.”
“You see!” said Tia Luz. “Is it a wonder I am cold with the fear when she is away from my eyes? I have lived to see the people who go into the desert for adventure, and whose bare bones are all any man looks on again! Beside the mountain wells of Carrizal my own cousin’s husband died; he could not climb to the tank in the hill. There they found him in the moon of Kumaki, which is gray and nothing growing yet.”
“Yes, many’s the salt outfit in the West played out before they reached Tinajas Altas,” said Pike. “I’ve heard curious tales about that place, and the Carrizals as well. Billie’s father nearly cashed in down in the Carrizals, and one of his men did.”
“But that is what I am saying. It was Dario Ruiz,” stated Tia Luz. “Yes, señor, that was the time, and it was for the nameless ranges they went seeking, and for adventures, treasure too; but–his soul to God! it was death Dario was finding on that trail. Your father never would speak one word again of the treasure of that old fable, for Dario found death instead of the red gold, and Dario was compadre to him.”
“The red gold?” and Cap Pike’s eyes were alight with interest. “Why, I was telling Kit about that today, the red gold of El Alisal.”
“Yes, Señor Capitan, once so rich and so red it was a wonder in Spain when the padres are sending it there from the mission of Soledad, and then witches craft, like a cloud, come down and cover that mountain. So is the vein lost again, and it is nearly one hundred years. So how could Dario think to find it when the padres, with all their prayer, never once found the trail?”
“I never heard it was near a mission,” remarked Pike. “Why, if it had a landmark like that there should be no trouble.”
“Yet it is so, and much trouble, also deaths,” stated Tia Luz. “That is how the saying is that the red gold of El Alisal is gold bewitched, for of Soledad not one adobe is now above ground unless it be in the old walls of the hacienda. All is melted into earth again or covered by the ranch house, and it is said the ranch house is also neglected now, and many of its old walls are going.”
“There are still enough left to serve as a very fair fortress,” remarked Singleton. “I was down there two years ago when we bought some herds from Perez, and lost quite a number from lack of water before the vaqueros got them to La Partida wells. It is a long way between water holes over in Altar.”
“Sure,” agreed Pike, “but if the old mine was near a mission, and the mission was near the ranch of Soledad it should not be a great stunt to find it, and there must be water and plenty of it if they do much in cattle.”
“They don’t these days,” said Singleton. “Perez sold a lot rather than risk confiscation, and I heard they did have some raids down there. I thought I had heard most of the lost mine legends of western Sonora, but I never heard of that one, and I never heard that Fred Bernard went looking for it.”
The old woman lifted her brows and shrugged her shoulders with the suggestion that Sonora might hold many secrets from the amicable gentleman. But a little later, in an inquiry from Rhodes she explained.
“See you, señor, Dario Ruiz was compadre of Señor Alfredo Bernard, Americanos not understanding all in that word, and the grandfather of Dario was major-domo of the rancho of Soledad at that time the Apaches are going down and killing the people there. That is when the mine was lost. On the skin of a sheep it was told in writing all about it, and Dario had that skin. Sure he had! It was old and had been buried in the sand, and holes were eaten in it by wild things, but Don Alfredo did read it, and I was hearing the reading of it to Dario Ruiz, but of what use the reading when that mine bewitched itself into hiding?”
“But the writing? Did that bewitch itself away also?” demanded Billie.
“How could I be asking of that when Dario was dead down there in the desert, and his wife, that was my cousin Anita, was crazy wild against Don Alfredo the father of you! Ai, that was a bad time, and Don Alfredo with black silence on him for very sorrow. And never again in his life did he take the Sonora trail for adventures or old treasure. And it is best that you keep to a mind like his mind, señorita. He grew wise, but Dario died for that wisdom, and in Sonora someone always dies before wisdom is found. First it was two priests went to death for that gold, and since that old day many have been going. It is a witchcraft, and no blessing on it!”
“Well, I reckon I’d be willing to cross my fingers, and take the trail if I could get started right,” decided Rhodes. “It certainly sounds alluring.”
“I did go in once,” confessed Pike, “but we had no luck, struck a temporale where a Papago had smallpox, and two dry wells where there should have been water. My working pardner weakened at Paradones and we made tracks for the good old border. That is no trail for a lone white man.”
“But the writing, the writing!” persisted Billie. “Tia Luz, you are a gold mine yourself of stories, but this one you never told, and I am crazy about it! You never forget anything, and the writing you could not,–so we know you have the very words of that writing!”
“Yes, that is true too, for the words were not so many, and where some words had been the wild things had eaten holes. The words said that from the mine of El Alisal the mission of Soledad could be seen. And from the door of Soledad it was one look, one only, to the blue cañoncita where the alisal tree was growing, and water from the gold of the rose washed the roots of that tree.”
“Good God!” muttered Rhodes staring at the old lady who sat nodding her head in emphasis until her jet and gold earrings were all a-twinkle. “It was as easy as that,–yet no one found it?”
“But señor,”–and it was plain to be seen that Doña Luz was enjoying herself hugely as the center of all attention, “the two padres who made that writing met their death at that place–and it was said the barbaros at last killed also the grandfather of Dario, anyway he did die, and the women were afraid to tell even a new padre of that buried writing for the cause that it must have been accursed when it killed all people. That is how it was, and that mission was forsaken after that time. A Spaniard came up from Sinaloa and hunted gold and built Soledad hacienda where that mission had been in that old time, but no one ever found any more of gold than the chickens always are picking, a little here, a little there with a gravel in the craw. No señor, only once the red gold–red as flame–went out of Altar on a mule to the viceroy in Mexico, and the padres never lived to send any more, or see their brothers again. The men who dug that gold dug also their grave. Death goes with it.”
“Ugh!” and Billie shivered slightly, and looked at Rhodes, “don’t you go digging it!”
His eyes met hers across the table. It was only for an instant, and then Billie got very busy with her coffee which she had forgotten.
“Oh, I’d travel with a mascot to ward off evil,” he said. “Would you give me a bead from your string?”
She nodded her head, but did not speak. No one noticed them, for Cap Pike was telling of the old native superstition that the man who first found an ore bed found no good luck for himself, though the next man might make a fortune from it.
“Why,” he continued in evidence, “an Indian who finds even a vein of special clay for pottery doesn’t blaze a trail to it for anyone else. He uses it if he wants it, because his own special guardian god uncovered it for him, but if it is meant for any other man, that other man’s god will lead him to it when the time comes. That is how they reason it out for all the things covered by old Mother Earth. And I reckon the redder the gold the more secret the old barbaros would be about it, for gold is their sun-god medicine, or symbol, or something.”
“With white priests scattered through Sonora for two centuries one would suppose those old superstitions would be pretty well eradicated,” remarked Singleton.
Doña Luz glanced at him as at a child who must be let have his own ideas so long as they were harmless, but Pike laughed.
“Lord love you, Singleton, nothing eradicates superstition from the Indian mind, or any other mind! All the creeds of the earth are built on it, and a lot of the white ones are still alive and going strong! And as for priests, why man, the Indian priests are bred of those tribes, and were here before the white men came from Spain. It’s just about like this: If ‘Me und Gott’ and the U-boats took a notion to come over and put a ball and chain on all of so-called free America, there might be some pacifist mongrels pretend to like it, and just dote on putting gilt on the chain, and kow-towing to that blood-puddin’ gang who are raising hell in Belgium. But would the thoroughbreds like it? Not on your life! Well, don’t you forget there were a lot of thoroughbreds in the Indian clans even if some of their slaves did breed mongrels! And don’t forget that the ships from overseas are dumping more scrub stock on the eastern shores right now than you’ll find in any Indian rancheria either here in Pima or over in Sonora. The American isn’t to blame for all the seventeen dozen creeds they bring over,–whether political or religious, and I reckon that’s about the way the heads of the red clans feel. They are more polite than we are about it, but don’t you think for a moment that the European invasion ever changed religion for the Indian thoroughbred. No sir! He is still close to the earth and the stars, and if he thinks they talk to him–well, they just talk to him, and what they tell him isn’t for you or me to hear,–or to sit in judgment on either, if it comes to that! We are the outsiders.”
“Now, Cap,” said Billie, “I’m going to take it away. It’s too near your elbow, and you have had a double dose for every single one you’ve been handing out! You can take a rest until the others catch up. Tia Luz, give him a cup of coffee good and strong to help get his politics and religion straightened out.”
Pike laughed heartily with the rest of them, and took the coffee.
“All right, dear little Buttercup. Any medicine you hand out is good to me. But say, that dope about hidden ores may not be all Indian at that, for I recollect that mountaineers of Tennessee had the same hunch about coal veins, and an old lead vein where one family went for their ammunition. They could use it and they did, but were mighty sure they’d all be hoodooed if they uncovered it for anyone else, so I reckon that primitive dope does go pretty far back. I’ll bet it was old when Tubal Cain first began scratching around the outcroppings by his lonesomes.”
Conrad sauntered along the corridor and seated himself, flicking idly some leather thongs he had cut out from a green hide with a curved sheath knife rather fine and foreign looking. Singleton called him to come in and have coffee, but he would not enter, pleading his evil-smelling pipe as a reason.
“It can’t beat mine for a downright bachelor equipment,” affirmed Pike, “but I’ve scandalized this outfit enough, or thereabout, and that venison has killed all our appetites until breakfast, so why hang around where ungrateful children swat a man’s dearest hobbies?”
“If you think you’ll get rid of me that way you had better think again,” said Billie. “I don’t mind your old smokes, or any other of your evil ways, so long as you and Tia Luz tell us more bewitched mine stories. Say, Cap, wouldn’t it be great if that old sheepskin was found again, and we’d all outfit for a Sonora pasear, and–”
“We would not!” decided the old man patting her hair. “You, my lady, will take a pasear to some highbrow finishing school beyond the ranges, and I’ll hit the trail for Yuma in a day or two, but at the present moment you can wind up the music box and start it warbling. That supper sure was so perfect nothing but music will do for a finish!”
The men drifted out in the corridor and settled into the built-in seats of the plazita, though Rhodes remained standing in the portal facing inward to the patio where the girl’s shimmering white dress fluttered in the moonlight beside the shadowy bulk of Tia Luz.
He lit a cigarette and listened for the music box Pike had suggested, but instead he heard guitar strings, and the little ripple of introduction to the old Spanish serenade Vengo a tu ventana, “I come to your window.”
He turned and glanced towards the men who were discussing horse shipments, and possibilities of the Prussian sea raiders sinking transports on the way to France, but decided his part of that discussion could wait until morning.
Tia Luz had lit the lamp in the sala, and the light streamed across the patio where the night moths fluttered about the white oleanders. He smiled in comical self-derision as he noticed the moths, but tossed away the cigarette and followed the light.
When Captain Pike indulged the following morning in sarcastic comment over Kit’s defection, the latter only laughed at him.
“Shirk business? Nothing doing. I was strictly on the job listening to local items on treasure trails instead of powwowing with you all over the latest news reports from the Balkans. Soon as my pocket has a jingle again, I am to get to the French front if little old U. S. won’t give me a home uniform, but in the meantime Doña Luz Moreno is some reporter if she is humored, and I mean to camp alongside every chance I get. She has the woman at the cantina backed off the map, and my future Spanish lessons will be under the wing of Doña Luz. Me for her!”
“Avaricious young scalawag!” grunted Pike. “You’d study African whistles and clicks and clacks if it blazed trail to that lost gold deposit! Say, I sort of held the others out there in front thinking I would let you get acquainted with little Billie, and you waste the time chinning about death in the desert, and dry camps to that black-and-tan talking machine.”
Kit only laughed at him.
“A record breaker of a moon too!” grumbled the old man. “Lord!–lord! at your age I’d crawled over hell on a rotten rail to just sit alongside a girl like Billie–and you pass her up for an old hen with a mustache, and a gold trail!”
Kit Rhodes laughed some more as he got into the saddle and headed for the Granados corral, singing:
Oh–I’ll cut off my long yellow hair
To dress in men’s array,
And go along with you, my dear
Your waiting man to be!
He droned out the doleful and incongruous love ballad of old lands, and old days, for the absurd reason that the youth of the world in his own land beat in his blood, and because in the night time one of the twinkling stars of heaven had dropped down the sky and become a girl of earth who touched a guitar and taught him the words of a Spanish serenade,–in case he should find a Mexican sweetheart along the border!
For to neither of the young, care-free things, had come a glimmer of fore-vision of the long tragic days, treasure trails and desert deaths, primitive devotions and ungodly vengeance, in which the threads of their own lives would be entangled before those two ever heard the music of the patio again–together.
If in Holland fields I met a maid
All handsome fond and gay,
And I should chance to love her
What would my Mary say?
What would I say, dear Willie?
That I would love her too,
And I would step to the one side
That she might speak with you!
“Yes, you would–not!” he stated in practical prose to no one in particular. “Not if you were our girl, would she, Pardner?”
Pardner tossed up his head in recognition of the comradeship in the tone, and Kit Rhodes became silent, and rode on to the corrals, happily smiling at some new thoughts.
CHAPTER III
A VERIFIED PROPHECY OF SEÑORITA BILLIE
That smile was yet with him when he saw the herd and the vaqueros coming up from the water tanks, and noted Conrad and Tomas Herrara talking together beside Conrad’s automobile.
The beat of the many hoofs prevented the two men from noting one horse near them, and words of Conrad came to him clearly.
“It has to be that way. You to go instead of Miguel. You have enough English, you can do it.”
Tomas Herrara muttered something, evidently reluctance, for again Conrad’s words were heard.
“But think of the dinero, much of money to you! And that fool swine will not see what is under his nose. You can do it, sure you can! There is no danger. The blame will be to him if it is found; my agent will see to that. Not you but the gringo will be the one to answer the law. You will know nothing.”
He spoke in Spanish rapidly, while both men watched the approaching vaqueros.
The smile had gone from Kit’s face, and he was puzzled to follow the words, or even trust his own ears.
“Bueno,” said Herrara with a nod of consent. “Since Miguel is hurt–”
“Whoa, Pardner,” sang out Rhodes, back of them as he slid out of the saddle. “Good morning, gentlemen. Do you say Miguel is hurt, Herrara? How comes that?”
The face of Herrara went a curious gray, and his lips blue and apparently stiff for he only murmured, “Buenas dias, señor,” and gulped and stared at Conrad. But the surprise of Conrad, while apparent, was easily accounted for, and he was too well poised to be startled unduly by any emergency.
“Hah! Is it you, Rhodes, so early? Yes, Miguel is reported hurt over Poso Verde way. Not serious, but for the fact that he was the one to go with you on the horse shipment, and now another must go. Perhaps his brother here.”
“Oh–ah–yes,” assented Rhodes thoughtfully. He was not so old as Conrad, and quite aware he was not so clever, and he didn’t know their game, so he strove as he could to hold the meaning of what he had heard, and ended rather lamely: “Well, too bad about Miguel, but if you, Tomas, are going instead, you had better get your war togs ready. We start tonight from the Junction, and have three hours to get ready.”
“Three hours only!” again Herrara seemed to weaken. To start in three hours a journey into the unknown far East of the Americano was beyond his imaginings. He shrugged his shoulders, tossed his hands outwards in despair, and turned toward the barns.
Conrad looked after him in irritation, and then smiled at Rhodes. He had a rather ingratiating smile, and it the first time he had betrayed it to Kit.
“These explosive Latins,” he said derisively. “I think I can make him reasonable, and you go forward with your own preparations.”
He followed Herrara, leaving Kit staring after them wondering. His glance then rested on the automobile, and he noted that it had not merely come out of the garage for the usual work of the day. It had been traveling somewhere, for the wheels were crusted with mud–mud not there at sunset yesterday. And in that section of Pima there was no water to make mud nearer than Poso Verde, and it was over there Miguel Herrara had been hurt!
He had only three hours, and no time to investigate. There were rumors of smuggling all along the line over there, and strange conferences between Mexican statesmen and sellers of Connecticut hardware of an explosive nature. He recalled having heard that Singleton was from Connecticut, or was it Massachusetts? Anyway, it was over there at the eastern edge of the country somewhere, and it was also where plots and counter plots were pretty thick concerning ammunition; also they were more complicated on the Mexican border. He wondered if Singleton was as simple as he looked, for he certainly was paying wages to a mixed lot. Also it was a cinch to run any desirable contraband from Granados across to La Partida and from there hellwards.
He wondered if Singleton knew? But Singleton had a capable business manager, while he, Rhodes, was only a range boss with the understanding that he adjust himself to any work a white man might qualify for.
The mere fact that once he had sat at the family table might not, in Singleton’s eyes, warrant him in criticizing an approved manager, or directing suspicion towards him. He might speak to Pike, but he realized that Pike was not taken very seriously; only welcomed because Billie liked him, and because an American ranch usually had the open door for the old timers of his caliber.
Also Pike had told him plainly that he must not be expected to mix up in the Mexican game for any reason whatsoever.
“I reckon it’s up to us, Pardner,” he decided, as he called directions to the different men loading the wagons with oats and barley for the stock on the trail. There were three mule teams ready for the railroad junction where the cars were waiting on the siding, or would be by night.
Some of the men were getting the mules straightened out in the harness while others were roping horses in the corral. It would take most of the home outfit to lead and drive them to the railroad, which meant one lonely and brief period of hilarity at the only joint where “bootleg” whiskey could be secured by the knowing, and a “movie” theater could add to other simple entertainments for the gentle Juans of the ranges. Neither Conrad nor Herrara were visible, and he presumed the latter was making arrangements for the sudden and unexpected departure from his family, but he knew he had not attempted to ride home for a farewell greeting, because his horse still stood near Conrad’s automobile where he had first overheard that curious conversation between the two men.
After a leisurely breakfast Pike was meandering towards the stock yard on his mule with the intent to trail along to the Junction with the boys. Rhodes, catching sight of him, looked hopefully but unsuccessfully for Singleton. The minutes were slipping by, and no definite instructions had been given him concerning the three car loads of horses. Did Conrad mean to leave every detail until the last moment and make difficulties for the new man? Was that the way he got rid of the Americans he didn’t want? He recalled the prophecy of Billie that he would not hold his job. Well, he would show her!
With memories of the white and gold vision of the previous night, and the guitar in the sala, and the moonlight touching all to enchantment, he had fully decided that he would not only hold the job, but on some future day he would be business manager. And he’d find that lost mine or know the reason why, and he would–
For after all Kit Rhodes was only twenty-three and all of life ahead of him for dreams! He was wondering what he could fetch back from the East that would be acceptable to a witchy elf of a butterfly girl who already had, to his simple estimate, all the requisites of a princess royal.
Juanito came loping past, and Rhodes asked for his father.
“I am myself looking for him,” said the boy. “He has there on his horse all the things for Tio Miguel, but Miguel not coming, and I wonder who goes? Maybe it will be me. What you think?” he asked hopefully.
Kit did not answer, for Juanito’s mention of the articles for Miguel brought from home by Tomas, and still fastened to the back of the saddle, drew his attention to the articles tied there–some clothing badly wrapped, a pair of black shoes tied together with brown strings, and under them, yet plainly visible, a canvas water bag.
There was nothing unusual in a water bag or a canteen tied back of any saddle in the dry lands, it was the sensible thing to do, but Kit found himself staring at this particular water bag stupidly, remembering where he had seen it last. It had been only partly full then, but now it was plump and round as if water-filled; yet one glance told him it was not wet, and moreover, he had noted the day before a hole in the side tied up in a hard knot by twine, and there was the knot!
Yet it might be a stock of pinole, parched corn, as evidence of Miguel’s forethought against privation on the long eastern trail. He could think of several reasonable things to account for an old water bag tied to a Mexican’s saddle, but reason did not prevent his glance turning to it again and again.
The fear in Narcisco’s eyes came back to him, and his attempt to cover his harmless playthings at the coming of the unexpected American. He wondered–
“Say, Bub, I’ve got ten dollars to invest in some little trinket for Billie boy, and I want you to put it down in your jeans and invest it in whatever it will cover,” said Captain Pike at his elbow, clinking the silver coin meditatively. “You’ll have time to see plenty attractive things for the money there in the streets of New York, or Baltimore, or whichever of the dock towns you’ll be heading for.”
Rhodes accepted the coin, absently frowning.
“That’s one of the dark secrets not yet divulged by this curious management,” he growled. “I’m to go, or so I was told, but have been given no instructions. Where’s Singleton?”
“Just rounded up for breakfast.”
“Is he coming down here to the corrals?”
“Not that I could notice. Pedro got in from the Junction with last Sunday’s papers, and he and Billie have the picture sheets spread around, having a weekly feast.”
Kit strode over to his mount, and then halted, glancing towards the house a half mile away, and then at the telephone poles along the wide lane.
“Say, there’s a telephone somewhere down here at the works, connecting with the hacienda, isn’t there?”
“Sure, in that hallway between the two adobes where the bunk house ends and offices begin.”
Kit started briskly towards the long bunk house, and then turned to Pike.
“Do me a favor, Captain. Stay right there till I get back, and don’t let anyone take that Herrara horse away, or his load!”
“All right, but load!–why, the spotted rat hasn’t got a load for a jack rabbit, load!” and Pike sniffed disdain at the little knobs of baggage dangling from the rawhide strings. He didn’t think the subdued animal needed watching–still, if Kit said so–
At the same time Kit was calling the house, and hearing in reply a soft whistle of the meadow lark, and then a girl’s laugh.
“Your music is good to listen to, Lark-child,” he called back, “and your ears are perfectly good at telling who’s who, but this is a strictly business day, and it is Mr. Singleton I need to speak with.”
“Still holding your job, or asking for your time?” came the mocking voice.
“You bet I’m holding my job, also I am on it, and want the boss.”
“Well, sometimes you know the boys call me the boss. What can we do for you, Mr. Kit Rhodes?”
“I’ll use all three of my Spanish cuss words in a minute, if you don’t be reasonable,” he thundered.
“Is that a bribe?” came sweetly over the wire, and when he muttered something impatiently, she laughed and told him it was not fair to use another language when he had promised Spanish.
“Listen to me, young lady, if I can’t get Singleton on the wire I’ll get on a horse and go up there!”
“And you listen to me, young man, it wouldn’t do you a bit of good, for just now he is nearly having a fit, and writing telegrams about something more important than the horse corrals.”
“There is nothing more important this day and date,” insisted Kit.
“Well, if you were as strictly a white dove advocate as Papa Singleton is, and as neutral, and then saw a full page Sunday supplement of your pet picture fraulein, working for your pet charity and sifting poison into hospital bandages and powdered glass in jellies for the soldiers of the Allies, I reckon you would change your mind.”
“Powdered glass!–in feed!” repeated Kit, stunned at the words and the sudden thought they suggested. “Great God, girl, you don’t have to go to the eastern papers for that! You’ve got the same trick right here in Granados this minute! Why–damn you!”
The receiver fell from his hand as a crushing blow was dealt him from the door at his back. He heard a girl’s scream in the distance as he grappled with Conrad and saved himself a second blow from the automobile wrench in the manager’s hands. It fell to the tiles between them, and Rhodes kicked it to one side as he struck and struck again the white, furious face of Conrad.
“The wrench! Tomas, the wrench! Give it to him! The Americano would murder me!” shouted Conrad.
Tomas had other things to think of. He had heard as much as Conrad of the telephone discourse, and was aware of his pinto standing placidly not fifty feet away, with all the damning evidence in the case tied to the back of the saddle!
Juanito, however, ran like a cat at his master’s call and caught up the wrench, but halted when Pike closed on his shoulder and pressed a cold little circle of blue steel against his ribs.
“Not this time, muchacho!” he shrilled, “drop it! This is a man’s game, and you’re out.”
The men came running, and others attempted to interfere, but the little old man waved the gun at them and ordered them to keep their distance.
“No crowding the mourners!” he admonished them gleefully. “I’ve a hunch your man started it, and my man will finish it. I don’t know what it’s about, Kit, but give him hell on suspicion! Go to it, boy,–do it again! Who-ee!–that was a sock-dolager! Keep him off you, Kit, he’s a gouger, and has the weight. Give it to him standing, and give it to him good! That’s it! Ki-yi! Hell’s bells and them a-chiming!”
