Kitabı oku: «Louisiana Lou. A Western Story», sayfa 8
CHAPTER XI
JIM BANKER HITS THE TRAIL
When Jim Banker, the prospector, hurried from the hotel, he was singularly agitated for a man merely suffering from the shyness of the desert wanderer in the presence of a pretty woman. His furtive looks and the uneasy glances he cast behind him, no less than the panicky character of his flight, might have aroused further question on the part of those he left, had they been in a position to observe the man.
He made no pause until he had gained the comparative seclusion of Johnny the Greek’s place, which he found almost deserted after the riot of which De Launay had been the center. Johnny had succeeded in getting rid of the officers without the discovery of his illicit operations, and Snake Murphy was once more in his place ready to dispense hospitality. Few remained to accept it, however, the imminent memory of the police having frightened all others away. A liberal dispensation of money and the discovery that De Launay’s coat and shoes were of excellent make and more valuable than those he had lost, had secured the silence of the man whom De Launay had robbed, and he had departed some time since.
Banker sidled into the upstairs room and made his way to the end of the bar, where he called huskily for whisky. Having gulped a couple of fiery drinks, he shivered and straightened up, his evil eyes losing their look of fright.
“Say, Murph,” he whispered, hoarsely. “They’s the devil to pay!”
“How come?” asked Murphy, yawning.
“You remember French Pete, who was killed back in nineteen hundred?”
“The Basco? Sure I do. I got a reminder, hain’t I? Louisiana done shot me up before he went out an’ beefed Pete – if he did beef him.”
“If he did? Whatever makes you say that? If he didn’t– who did?” Jim blurted out the question in a gasp, as though fairly forcing utterance of the words. Murphy flicked a sidelong look at him and then bent his absent gaze across the room.
“Oh – I dunno. Never knew Louisiana to use a rifle, though. The dare-devil! I can hear him now, ridin’ off a-laughin’ and a-chortlin’
“Back to Whisky Chitto; to Beau Regarde bayou;
To my Louisiana – Louisiana Lou.
“Remember the feller’s singin’, Jim?”
The few men in the place had turned startled eyes as Murphy whined the doggerel ballad nasally. It was strange to them, but Banker shivered and shrank from the grinning bartender.
“Stop it, yuh darn fool! yuh gi’ me the creeps! W’at’s the matter with everything to-day? Everywhere I go some one starts gabblin’ about mines and French Pete an’ this all-fired – Louisiana! It’s a damn good thing there ain’t any more like him around here.”
“W’at’s that about mines – an’ French Pete? Yuh was the one that mentioned him.”
Banker leaned confidentially nearer. “Snake, d’yuh think old Ike Brandon didn’t know where the mine was?”
Snake regarded him contemptuously. “Yuh reckon Ike would have lived and died pore as a heifer after a hard winter if he’d a knowed? You’re loco, Jim: plumb, starin’, ravin’ loco!”
But Jim only leaned closer and dropped his voice until it was almost inaudible.
“Maybe so. But did you or any one else ever know what language them Bascos talks?”
“French, I reckon,” said Snake, indifferently.
“French, no, sir! Charlie Grandjean, that used to ride fer Perkins & Company was French and he told me once that they didn’t talk no French nor nothin’ like it. They talks their own lingo and there ain’t nobody but a Basco that knows this Basco talk.”
“Well,” said Snake, easily. “What’s the answer? I’ll bite.”
“French Pete’s gal has lit in here all spraddled out an’ lookin’ fer French Pete’s mine,” croaked Banker, impressively. Snake was owlishly dense.
“His gal? Never knew he had a gal.”
“He had one, a plenty: sort of a gashly critter like a witch, with teeth all same like a lobo. Kind ’at’d stick a knife in yuh quick as look at yuh.”
“I reckon I won’t go sparkin’ her none, then. Well, how’s this here Basco lady with the enchantin’ ways allow she’s goin’ to find Pete’s mine?”
“That’s what I’m askin’ yuh? How’s she goin’ to find it? Yuh reckon she comes pirootin’ out here all the way from Basco regions just on the hunch that she can shut her eyes an’ walk to it?”
“Maybe – if she’s full o’ witchcraft. I reckon she stands as good a chance that a way as any one does. Drink up and ferget it, Jim.”
“I been a-thinkin’, Snake. Brandon didn’t know where it was. But maybe Pete leaves a writin’, say, which he tells Ike to send to his folks. It’s in Basco, see, and Ike can’t read it nor nobody else, so they sends it to this Basco place and the gal gits it. If that ain’t right why ever does this Basco lady come a-runnin’ out here?”
“If it is right, why does she delay all these years?” asked Snake, pertinently.
“Which yuh ain’t seen her, Snake. I makes a guess this gal ain’t more’n risin’ two or three years when she gets that Basco note. She has to grow up, and when she gets big enough the war done come along and keeps her holed up until now. Yuh can gamble she knows where that mine was.”
Snake pondered this theory thoughtfully. “Yuh may be right at that,” he admitted, an expression of wonder passing over his features. “But yuh been to see her? What she say about it?”
“Huh! She was askin’ me if I knowed where it was. But that was just a blind to put me off’n the track – an’ she probably wanted to make sure no one else had found it. She was quizzin’ that Pettis girl, too, makin’ sure Ike hadn’t told her nothin’.”
“Yuh may be right,” admitted Snake again. “God-dlemighty! Yuh reckon she’ll find it?”
Jim leered evilly at him. “No, I don’t reckon she will. But she might help me find it.”
“Howzzat?” Snake was startled.
“I gotta have a grubstake, Snake. How about it?”
“Jest outline this here project, Jim. Let me git the slant on it.”
The two heads, one slick and black, though with streaks of gray, the other shaggy, colorless, and unkempt, came together and a growl of hoarse and carefully guarded whispers murmured at that end of the bar. After ten minutes’ talk, Snake went to the safe and returned with a roll of bills and a piece of paper, pen, and ink. He laboriously made out a document, which Banker as laboriously signed. Then Snake surrendered the money and the two rascals shook hands.
Banker at once became all furtive activity. For a few hours he slunk from store to store, buying necessaries for his trip. By nighttime he was ready, and before the moon had risen in the cold November sky he was hazing his burros southward toward the Nevada line.
Although he was mounted on a fairly good horse, his progress was necessarily slow, as he had to accommodate his pace to that of the sedate burros. He was in no hurry, however. With true, desert-born patience, he plodded along, making camp that night about ten miles from Sulphur Falls. The following day he resumed his snaillike pace, crawling out of the fertile valley to the grasslands beyond, and so on and on until the night found him in the salt pan and the alkali. He passed the Brandon ranch at Three Creek, long since sold and now occupied by a couple of Basques who had built up from sheep-herding for wages until they now owned and ran a fair flock of sheep. Here he did not stop, hazing his burros past as though he had suddenly acquired a reason for haste. When Twin Forks was a couple of miles to the rear he reverted to his former sluggish pace.
The next day was a repetition. He plodded on stolidly, making without hesitation for some spot which was ahead of him. Finally, that evening, he made camp about three miles north of Wallace’s Lazy Y Ranch, near Willow Spring, and not very far from the gap in the wall of the Esmeraldas which marked the entrance to Shoestring Creek and Cañon.
The next morning he did not break camp, but lolled around all day until about three o’clock in the afternoon. At that time his acute ears caught the murmur of a motor long before the car came in sight in the rolling ground.
When it passed he was sitting stolidly by his camp fire, apparently oblivious to his surroundings. He did not seem to look up or notice the car, but, in reality, not a detail of it escaped him. He saw the occupants turn and look at him and heard their comments, though the words escaped him.
He muttered an imprecation, strangely full of hate and, in the manner of lonely desert rats, grumbled in conversation with himself.
“I gotta do it. She never come all this way without he told her somethin’. Fer all I know he might ha’ seen more’n I thought. An’ she’d do what she said, quicker’n look at yuh. She ain’t right, nohow. Why don’t she show her face? An’ Charlie Grandjean says them Basques is uncanny, that a way. She knows! There ain’t no gettin’ around it. Even if he never told her, she knows!”
The car had passed and he now openly looked after it, mouthing and muttering. He had observed the driver, a hired chauffeur from the town, and he deduced that the car was going back. Indeed, there was no road by which it could have gone into the mountains at this point. He saw that young Wallace, nicknamed Sucatash from the color of his hair, and Dave MacKay, another of the Lazy Y riders, were in the car with their saddles, and that the veiled Basque girl was seated with them, while her luggage was piled high between the seats.
“Goin’ to git hosses and outfit at Wallace’s and go in from there. Course, they’ll have to go into Shoestring. It’s the only way. They’ll stop at Wallace’s and it’ll take a day to git the cavvy up and ready. They’ll be movin’ day after to-morrow ’nless they want to git caught in the snow. Proves she knows right where to go or she wouldn’t head in there this time o’ year.”
He gloomed some more.
“That girl ain’t right. She’s one o’ these here hypnotis’, er a medium, er some kind o’ witch. But she ain’t goin’ to git away with it. She ain’t goin’ to git the best of old Jim Banker after nineteen years. She ain’t goin’ to git her knife into Jim. No more’n old Panamint did. I fixed him– an’ I’ll fix her, too. Old Betsy’s still good fer a couple a’ hunderd yards, I reckon. I’ll let her lead me to it – er maybe I’ll git a chance to ketch her alone.”
This thought gave him pleasure for a while and he mumbled over it for an hour or two. Then he ate his evening meal and went to sleep. In his sleep he moaned a good deal and tossed about, dreaming of mysterious, ghostlike, veiled figures which threatened him and mocked him.
The next day he remained where he was. About noon he was puzzled at the sight of another motor car northward bound. He recognized in the driver the lawyer who had been present when he had been interviewed by the French girl, but he did not know what brought him there. Manifestly, he was on the way back to Sulphur Falls, and Banker finally concluded that he had been to Maryville, the county seat south of the Esmeraldas, on some legal business. In this he was right, though he could not guess what the business was nor how it favored his own designs.
On the following day he resumed his march. Now he followed the trail of the motor car which had brought Solange until he came opposite Wallace’s ranch. From here he took up another trail, that of a considerable train of pack horses and three saddle animals. It led straight to the steep gully in the rim of the Esmeraldas, where Shoestring Creek cut its way to the plain.
He noted, but hardly considered, an older trail that underlay this one. It was of a rider and two pack animals who had passed a day or two before.
CHAPTER XII
A REMINDER OF OLD TIMES
Much cheered and encouraged by his late adventures with the forces of law and order, De Launay fared onward to the south where the dim line of the Esmeraldas lay like a cloud on the horizon. He was half conscious of relief, as though something that had been hanging over his head in threat had been proved nonexistent. He did not know what it was and was content for the time being to bask in a sort of animal comfort and exhilaration arising out of his escape into the far-stretching range lands. Here were no fences, no farms, no gingerbread houses sheltering aliens more acquainted with automobiles than with horses. He had passed the last of them, without interruption even from the justice of the peace who lived along the road. As a matter of fact, De Launay had left the road as soon as the fences permitted and had taken to the trackless sage.
Even after nineteen years or more his knowledge and instinct held good. Unerringly he seized upon landmarks and pushed his way over unmarked trails that he recalled from his youth. Before the sun set that evening he had ridden up to the long-remembered ranch at Twin Forks and swung from his saddle, heedless of two or three fierce mongrel sheep dogs that leaped and howled about him.
The door that opened on the little porch, once hung with vines, but now bare and gray, opened and a stolid, dark foreigner appeared. He answered De Launay’s hail in broken English, but the légionnaire’s quick ear recognized the accent and he dropped into French. The man at once beamed a welcome, although the French he answered in was almost as bad as his English.
He and his brother, he told De Launay, while assisting him to put up his horse, were two Basques who had come out here fifteen years ago and had worked as herders until they had been able to save enough to go into business for themselves. They had gradually built up until, when Ike Brandon had died, they were in a position to buy his ranch. All of this was interesting to the soldier.
The first flush of his plunge into old scenes had faded out, and he was feeling a little lonely and depressed, missing, queerly enough, his occasional contact with mademoiselle. It came over him, suddenly, as he chattered with the Basque, in the kindly French tongue that was more familiar to him than his native English, that the vague dread that had been lifted had had to do with what he might expect at Brandon’s ranch. That dread had vanished when he had encountered Miss Pettis. That was queer, too, for his recent debauch had been the product of sharp disappointment at finding her, as well as the country, so changed from what he had expected. Then why should he now feel as though a load were lifted from his mind since he had seen her and found her utterly wanting in any trait that he regarded as admirable? He did not know, and for the time being he did not pause to inquire. With the directness born of long training in arms, he had a mission to pursue and he gave his thought to that.
The obvious thing was to question the Basque as to long-ago events. But here he drew blank. Neither this man nor his brother knew anything but vague hearsay, half forgotten. They had, it is true, known the story of Pierre d’Albret and his murder, and had looked for his mine as others had, but they had never found it and were inclined to doubt that it had ever existed.
“Monsieur,” said the hospitable Basque, as he set an incomprehensible stew of vegetables and mutton on the table before the hungry De Launay, “these stories have many endings after so many years. It was long after D’Albret was killed that we came into this country. It was spoken of at the time as a great mystery by some, and by others it was regarded as a settled affair. One side would have it that a man who was a desperado and a murderer had done it, while others said that it would never be known who had shot him. There is only this that I know. A man named Banker, who spends all his time searching for gold, has spent year after year in searching the Esmeraldas for D’Albret’s mine and, although he has never found it, he still wanders in the hills as though he believed that it would be found at last. Now, why should this Banker be so persistent when others have abandoned the search long ago?”
“I suppose because it is his business, as much as he has any, to search for gold wherever there is prospect of finding it,” said De Launay, carelessly.
“That may be so,” said the Basque, doubtfully, “As for me, I do not believe that the mine was in the Esmeraldas at all. I have looked, as others have, and have never seen any place where D’Albret might have dug. I have been through Shoestring Cañon many times and have seen every foot of its surface. If D’Albret came through the cañon, as he must have done, he must have left some sign of his digging. Yet who has ever found such indications?”
“Perhaps he covered it up?”
“Perhaps! I do not know. The man, Banker, searches, not only in the cañon but also throughout the range. And as he searches, he mutters to himself. He is a very strange man.”
“Most prospectors, especially the old ones, are strange. The loneliness goes to their heads.”
“That is true, monsieur, and it is the case with herders, as we have known. But Banker is more than queer. Once, when we were with our flocks in the Esmeraldas, we observed, one evening, a fire at some distance. My brother went over to see who it was and to invite him to share our camp if he were friendly. He came upon the man, Banker, crouched over his fire and talking to himself. He seemed to be listening to something, and he muttered strange words which my brother could not understand. Yet my brother understood one phrase which the man repeated many times. It was, as he told me, something like ‘I will find it. I will find it. I will find the gold.’ But he also spoke of everybody dying, and my brother was uneasy, seeing his rifle lying close at hand. He endeavored to move away, but made some noise and the man heard him. He sprang to his feet with a cry of fear and shot with his rifle in the direction of my brother. Fortunately he did not hit him and my brother fled away. In the morning we found that Banker had departed in great haste during the night as though he feared some attack.”
“H’m,” said De Launay, “that’s rather strange. But these old desert rats get strange attacks of nerves. They become very distrustful of all human beings. He was frightened.”
“He may have been – indeed – he was. Nevertheless, the man Banker is a violent man and very evil. When he is about, we go carefully, my brother and I. If Pierre d’Albret was shot for no reason, what is to prevent us, who are also Basques, from being treated in the same way?”
“By Banker? Nonsense!”
“Nonsense it may be, monsieur. Yet I do not know why it may not have been some one like Banker who shot D’Albret. But I talk too much to you because you are French.”
He became reticent after that, and De Launay, who, whatever he may have thought of the man’s opinions, did not intend to make a confidant of him, allowed the subject to drop. He slept there that night, feeling reasonably safe from pursuit, and in the morning went on his way.
But again, as he rode steadily across the alkali and sage, the lightness of heart that had long been unfamiliar, came back to him. He found himself looking back at his vague sentiment for the little girl of the years gone by and the strange notion that he must come back to her as he had so lightly promised. He had had that notion in the full belief that she must have developed as she had bade fair to do. It had been a shock to find her as she was, but, after the shock, here was that incomprehensible feeling of relief. He had not wanted to find her, after all!
But why had he not? At this point he found his mind shifting to mademoiselle’s vivid and contrasting beauty and uttered a curse. He was getting as incorrigibly sentimental as a girl in her teens! This recurring interest in women was a symptom of the disease he had not yet shaken off. The cure lay in the fresh air and the long trail.
He pushed on steadily and rapidly, shutting his mind to everything but the exigencies of the trail. In the course of time he rode into Willow Spring, and, cautiously pushing his way into the cottonwoods and willows that marked the place, found everything there as he had arranged with Sucatash Wallace. There were few tracks of visitors among the signs left by cattle and an antelope, except the prints of one mounted man who had led two horses. The two horses he found hobbled beside the spring, and with them were a tarpaulin-covered pile of provisions, bedding, and utensils, together with packsaddles. A paper impaled on a willow twig near by he pulled down, to find a message written on it.
“Two pack outfits according to inventory. Compliments of J. B. Wallace. Return or send the price to Lazy Y Ranch when convenient. Asking no questions but wishing you luck.”
He chuckled over this, with its pungent reminder of ancient days when unhesitating trust had been a factor in the life of the range. Old man Wallace, at the behest of his son, turning over to an unknown stranger property of value, seeking not to know why, and calmly confident of either getting it back or receiving payment for it, was a refreshing draft from his youth. De Launay inspected his new property, found it all that he could wish and then set about his preparations for the night.
On the next day he saddled up early, after a meal at daybreak, but he did not start at once. Instead, while smoking more than one thoughtful cigarette, he turned over and over in his mind the problem that confronted him. He had pledged himself to help Solange in her search, but, rack his brains as he would, he could come to no conclusion about it except that it was simply a hopeless task. There was no point from which to start. People who remembered the affair were few and far between. Even those who did could have no very trustworthy recollections. There would have been an inquest, probably, and that would have been conducted in Maryville, east and south of the mountains. But would there be any record of it in that town? Recalling the exceedingly casual and informal habits of minor-elected officials of those days, he greatly doubted it. Still, Maryville offered him his only chance, as he saw it.
It took him all of that day and a part of the next to head around the Esmeraldas, across the high plateau into which it ran on the east and down to the valley in which Maryville lay. Here he found things changed almost as much as they had at Sulphur Falls, although the town had not grown in any such degree. The atmosphere, however, was strange and staidly conventional. Most of the stores were brick instead of wood with false fronts. The sidewalks were cement instead of boards. The main street was even paved. A sort of New England respectability and quietness hung over it. There was not a single saloon, and the drone of the little marble in the roulette wheel was gone from the land. Even the horses, hitched by drooping heads to racks, were scarce, and their place was taken by numerous tin automobiles of popular make and rusty appearance.
An inquiry at the coroner’s office developed the fact that there were no records reaching back beyond nineteen hundred and eight and the official could not even tell who had had the office in nineteen hundred.
De Launay, who had expected little success, made a few more inquiries but developed nothing. There were few in the town who had lived there that long, and while nearly all had heard something or other of the murdered Basque and his lost mine, they set it down to legend and shrugged their shoulders skeptically. The affairs of those who lived north of the Esmeraldas were not of great concern to the inhabitants of Maryville at any time and especially since the Falls had grown and outshadowed the place. All business of the country now went that way and none came over the barrier to this sleepy little place. In actual population it had fallen off.
Seeking for signs of the old general store that he recalled he found on its site a new and neat hardware establishment, well stocked with agricultural implements, automobile parts, weapons, and household goods. He wandered in, but his inquiry met the response that the original proprietor had long retired and was now living on a ranch south of the railroad. De Launay looked over the stock of weapons and asked to see an automatic pistol. The clerk laid an army model forty-five on the counter and beside it another of somewhat similar appearance but some distinct differences.
“A Mauser,” he explained. “Lot of them come in since the war and it’s a good gun.”
“Eight millimeter!” said De Launay, idly picking up the familiar pistol. “It’s a good gun but the ball’s too light to stop a man right. And the shells are an odd size. Might have some difficulty getting ammunition for it out here.”
“None around here,” said the clerk. “Plenty of those guns in the country. Most every store stocks all sizes nowadays. It ain’t like it used to be when every one shot a thirty, a thirty-eight, a forty-five-seventy, or a forty-five-ninety. Nowadays they use ’em all, Ross & Saugge, Remingtons, Springfields, Colts; and the shells run all the way from seven millimeter up through twenty-fives, eight millimeter, thirty,303, thirty-two, thirty-five, thirty-eight and so on. You can get shells to fit that gun anywhere you go.”
“Times have changed then,” said De Launay, idly. “I can remember when you couldn’t introduce a new gun with an odd caliber because a man couldn’t afford to take a chance on being unable to get the shells to fit it. Still, I’ll stick to the Colt. Let me have this and a couple of boxes of shells. And a left-hand holster,” he added.
There was nothing to keep him longer in the town since he saw no further prospect of getting any news, and his agreement to meet Solange necessitated his heading into the mountains if he were to be there on time. So, at the earliest moment, he got his packs on and started out of town, intending to cross the range from the south and come down into the cañon. The weather was showing signs of breaking, and if the snow should set in there might be difficulty in finding the girl.
That evening he camped in the southern foothills of the range just off the trail that mounted to the divide and plunged again down into Shoestring Cañon. Next day he resumed his ride and climbed steadily into the gloomy forests that covered the slopes, sensing the snow that hovered behind the mists on the peaks and wondering if Solange would plunge into it or turn back. He rather judged of her that a little thing like snow would not keep her from her objective.
But while the snow held off on this side of the mountains he knew that it might well have been falling for a day or two on the other side. When he came higher he found that he had plunged into it, lying thick on the ground, swirling in gusts and falling steadily. He did not stop for this but urged his horses steadily on until he had come to the windswept and comparatively clear divide and headed downward toward the cañon.
