Spanish Crossing

by Alan Lemay

  "Granddaughter," O'Riley corrected him. "How did you know 1 got her picture here?"

  "isn't that the usual play in a case like this?"

  "If you keep on having these damn' fool fits of giggling," said O'Riley with annoyance, "opportunity is going to pass you by!"

  "Heaven forbid," said Steve. "Get on with the description of your penniless granddaughter."

  "Well," the old man said grumpily, "she has a sort of kind face, so she has."

  "This part of your spiel isn't nearly as well worked up as the other," Hunter criticized him. "You ought to get hold of a more powerful description. Well.. .trot the chromo out."

  From a pocket of his brush jacket O'Riley dug a snapshot print, showing a girl on a horse. "She's staying down here at the Two Pine boarding house," O'Riley explained.

  At first Hunter thought the girl was one he had known before, for a swift, odd sense of recognition touched him as he perceived the clean, alert lift of her head, and the slim, relaxed grace with which she sat in the stock saddle. Her face, in the shadow of a big hat, was less clearly shown, but he could see that, from the camera's angle at least, this girl was lovely, too lovely to be connected in any way with the crooked old wowser who was trying to sell a mythical mine. A gust of anger stirred him.

  "1 don't know where you got this picture, nor who it's of," he growled at the old man, "but this I'll tell you flat.. .this girl hasn't any connection with any blue-sky mine, nor with any Dutchman named O'Riley, either, and I've a mind to see you jailed!"

  "Gimme that back!" shouted O'Riley.

  "All right. But I'm going to drive down to Two Pine. I'm going to find out if this girl is there. And if your story doesn't tally, this country isn't going to hold you, you hear?"

  "1 won't ride with you," snorted O'Riley. "I'll go back by hand, the way 1 come!"

  "Suit yourself"

  O'Riley wilted. "My story's too good," he almost whimpered. "It's so good nobody will believe it. I've got to have help, and have it soon! But if old Wild Bill's boy won't believe me, who will? I've tried a hundred fellers, and they're as bad or worse than you. God knows," he told Steve, "1'd like to haul off and bust you one. But you come very close to being the last shot in my gun." Suddenly his voice turned shrill, intense, and he shook his clawed hands before Steve Hunter's eyes. "It's there," he shouted. "1 know it's there! 1 know right where it is. A fortune, an everlasting fortune, lost in the hills ...and 1 can't get to it! I tell you, l know!"

  He jerked from a pocket a United States survey quadrangle, folded in innumerable accordion pleats. "It's these new maps showed me the light," he declared, shaking it out. "1 can stand here and put my finger on millions... millions, boy, you hear me?...right here on this map. But if 1 don't set my finger down, your chance is gone, and maybe mine, and maybe hers, too, and the fault is yours!"

  Steve Hunter blew smoke through his nose and studied the old man. It was incredible to him that anybody could lie so well. "Well, 1 still figure to drive to Two Pine," he said.

  "That's more like Wild Bill's boy!" said O'Riley with emotion. He led the way to Steve's battered mountain car at a shambling run.

  Down in front of the Two Pine boarding house a long blue roadster stood, its chromium fittings a bright dazzle in the sun.

  "That rig," said O'Riley, standing up to point, "belongs to the swivel-eared jackass that wants to stake me, and horn in on my mine. Only 1 won't let him. Trying to trim me! That's him at the wheel, and the other one is my granddaughter. Hey, June!"

  Steve Hunter angled in beside the blue roadster - and found himself looking directly into the eyes of the girl whom he had pronounced a myth. It was the girl of the snapshot, all right. Only this time there was no intervening shadow and no hat to hide her face. It was a thin face, tanned and lively. The soft, fine hair that framed it was the color of sunlight through autumn leaves, and her eyes - Steve could not have said whether they were green or brown or blue, or sometimes all three, in changing lights, but they were gentle, humorous, and awake.

  "You're Steve Hunter, aren't you?" said the myth. "This is Wally Parker."

  Steve shook hands with the smooth-haired young man at the wheel without noticing him much. He was absorbed with the baffling contrast between the old wowser, with his weatherreddened nose and historic whiskers, and the slender, smiling girl in the other car. If this truly was O'Riley's granddaughter, all that preposterous story about Lost Dutchman's gold needed a different explanation than that which he had so readily supplied.

  Wally Parker broke in. "Aren't you the Hunter who runs the Three Bar pack outfit? Can I speak to you a minute?"

  "Sure." Hunter, stepping to the board walk, found himself drawn along the walk by the stranger, out of earshot of the girl.

  "1 suppose," Parker began, "you've heard O'Riley's story by this time. I'm the boy that drove him up to your place this morning. You didn't see me. 1 let him out a little way down the road."

  "Where do you come in?" Steve asked.

  "I," said Wally Parker, "am the boy who takes a special and particular interest in June O'Riley."

  "Oh, you do?" said Steve.

  "O'Riley," said Parker, "is obviously the victim of selfhypnosis. He's told the story of Lost Dutchman's gold so often that he believes it himself... so much so that he has even convinced his granddaughter to some extent. I'm telling you this," he explained, "so that you will not think I'm an idiot."

  "Thanks. I'm glad to have it cleared up."

  "The O'Rileys," Parker went on, "are... bankrupt. They can't seem to understand that when June and 1 are married there will be no cause to worry about that. Meanwhile, this gold scare is a persistent nuisance. 1 can't chase the O'Rileys all over the West forever, you know."

  "No?" said Steve.

  "No," said Parker, "and I'm not at all sure that 1 like your tone of voice. However, you happen to fit my plans, so we'll overlook that. The trouble is, the old lunatic won't let me finance the final search, and, since nobody else is idiot enough, there the matter rests."

  "Not a bad place for it."

  "I don't agree with you. Didn't 1 mention that my plans are held up until the O'Rileys abandon this outlandish notion? Now, 1 want you to pack O'Riley to wherever the old fool thinks he has lost his mine. I'll pay all expenses, with a substantial bonus if June is convinced that Lost Dutchman's gold is nonexistent."

  "That is to say," said Steve Hunter, "you want me to pretend to take up his proposition myself?"

  "Exactly."

  Steve Hunter looked Parker over slowly. He couldn't make out exactly why the man in front of him roused him to instant resentment with his every word. Wally Parker was tall, slim, blond, and clean looking. He had too small an eye, perhaps, too long a nose, and too smooth a way, but none of these things accounted for the pleasure with which Steve considered eliminating Parker with one long wallop of his right hand. He rolled a cigarette.

  "Not at any price," he said at last. "1 wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole."

  Parker shrugged. "Oh, very well. I'll get somebody else."

  "You think you will?" said Hunter.

  He did not understand, then, what made him do what he did next. Certainly he had no belief in Lost Dutchman's gold. He could only tell himself, afterward, that it had seemed a good idea at the time. He walked to the blue car, where June was talking eagerly to old Dennis O'Riley.

  "Don't you fret, Miss O'Riley," he heard himself saying, "I'll help you find your darned old mine!"

  "Oh, good boy!" said June O'Riley.

  Long Thunder Mountain turned out to be old Dennis O'Riley's objective - a sufficiently inaccessible place in which to lose his gold. Not until the eleventh day did it loom over them, gaunt, black, and austere.

  "This is it," Dennis O'Riley exulted, "this is it! It all comes back to me plain. I'd know that hill from the floor of hell!"

  For an hour they pressed upward across the deeply carved face of Long Thunder. And there, incredibly, half an hour before dusk, they came upo
n O'Riley's ancient stope. One thing, at least, was decided for Steve Hunter in that moment. If he had any further doubt as to the sincerity of either the girl or the old man in their quest for Lost Dutchman's gold, it vanished here. No one could doubt the reality of the tears which the old man tried to hide as they trickled into his beard, or the overwhelming emotion of June O'Riley as she hugged her grandfather close in her arms.

  The old man snatched a pick-pointed hammer from a pack and rushed into the dark mouth of the stope. For ten minutes, while Hunter unsaddled his pack animals and made camp, he could hear the ring of steel on stone. Then, finally, O'Riley came running toward Hunter, both hands filled with fragments of rock. He pressed ragged chunks into Steve's hands. "Look at that! Look at that!"

  Steve looked, turning the fragments over, holding them close to his eyes in the failing light. He saw a dark volcaniclooking rock, which he could not immediately name, marked with innumerable small irregular inclusions of a steely gray, something like the wings of a Plymouth Rock hen, and his spirit dropped heavily.

  Now, Steve was no geologist. He didn't know a lot of things that there were to be known about the vast sheers of rock among which he lived. Yet he had spent his life in these hills, and he knew gold when he saw it, and this was not it.

  "O'Riley," he said, "this isn't the rock you got your sample from."

  For just a moment Lost Dutchman O'Riley let his embarrassment check his enthusiasm. He coughed twice and shifted his feet. "Now that we've actually found it and you can see that it's rich," he said, "1 suppose 1 may as well admit that the sample 1 showed you didn't come from here. I know as well as anybody," he said, "that there's nothing quite so exciting as plain, free gold, so I just run in that other sample to make my story more interesting." O'Riley's enthusiasm surged up again magnificently. "You know what that is?" he shouted. "You know what that is?" He extended the gray and black rock fragments to Steve once more in hands that shook with excitement. "That's graphite delirium. Graphite delirium, man!"

  "Graphite... what?" said Steve. A curious anger was upon him, an anger that somehow made him want to laugh, yet left him without energy for laughter or anything else.

  "Graphite delirium," cheered O'Riley again. "Rich in gold, rich in silver, and there's a million tons of it under the hill. We're rich, man, rich!"

  "I see," said Steve. He didn't know all the geology there was to know, but he was not impressed by graphite, and he knew that delirium was a state of mind. The painful thing was that June's hopes would now be riding high upon the old man's mad imagining. He turned his back upon O'Riley and the worthless stope.

  Next morning, putting on as cheerful a face as he was able, Steve Hunter set to work. That day he spent in digging and chipping little pot holes in the rock, systematically, in lines radiating from the abandoned stope. He sketched a rough map of the location with his pot holes marked upon it, and from each digging he took a sample which he carefully put away in a little bag marked with its map location. Yet all day long he saw not one trace of the yellow color for which he hoped against hope. He was only going through the motions that he would make if the discovery was real, and he knew that he was stalling, unable to make up his mind what he was going to say to June.

  People think what they want to think, he told himself. She'll never believe me against the old man. We'll take hack the rock samples and get them assayed. She 'll have to believe the assay. There's nothing 1 can do here.

  The next day they started back.

  Steve Hunter kept to himself quite a bit during those two weeks of the return. When spoken to directly concerning the Lost Dutchman's mine, he always grinned, but answered briefly, without committing himself. Sometimes June reproached him for his apparent indifference. Once, when they sat in front of a campfire, while O'Riley slept, she turned to him.

  "Don't you realize what's happened, Steve?" she said. "Why, we're rich, Steve! All three of us. Don't you realize this is the mine that Granddad had been hunting almost all his life?"

  "1 don't exactly rate a share," he said soberly. "All I've done is lend you some mules, June, and come along for the fishing. 1 was glad to do that, June. That you should know."

  "Of course, you own a share!" she insisted. "A half share, just as Granddad said to begin with. Nothing else will do!"

  He whispered to himself: Graphite delirium. Oh, good Lord! He wanted to caution her not to believe too strongly, to prepare her for what he knew must come. But, when his eyes met the dancing firelight reflected in hers, he could not.

  "I've made a thousand plans," she persisted. "1 suppose there'll be some delay while the mine is organized and all that, but, after that.. .first of all, I'm going to have tons of pretty things to wear, like Mother and 1 used to have before Dad's business went smash. Oh, wait until Wally Parker hears about this! You know, he never believed in Granddad at all."

  "Well," Steve commented, "that was mutual."

  "Granddad doesn't understand Wally, and that's a shame, too. Wally Parker is a peach in every way."

  "Are you going to marry Parker?"

  He had surprised himself by asking that. But somehow in the high, thin air of the pine forest, with its close stars, they seemed very near together.

  "Marry him? 1 don't know," she answered. "If Dad's business hadn't crashed, I suppose 1 would be married to him now."

  Steve Hunter said nothing.

  "1 suppose I'm foolish," she went on presently, "but you see Wally's family has so much money 1 couldn't possibly think of marrying anybody like that when we had nothing at all."

  "Must a million marry a million?" Steve asked.

  "I don't mean that. But, Steve, you don't realize how completely, utterly broke I was before we found the Lost Dutchman mine. When Dad died, he left nothing at all. Even the insurance had lapsed. 1 put every last dollar... literally... into coming out here with Granddad to take just one more look for his lost mine. It was a wild, crazy thing to do, 1 know. Do you know how broke we were when 1 first saw you in Two Pine? We had just enough to pay our board bill for two more days. As close to the edge as that!

  "So...you see...it wasn't a question of millions at all. If 1 had married Wally any time after Dad's crash, someday he would have got to thinking I had married him only as a rescue, not because 1 loved him at all. If 1 had had anything at all... enough to carry on with and hold my head up for a little way...it would have been different, but 1 didn't, and 1 couldn't marry him even when 1 wanted to. Do you see?"

  "And now?"

  "It's all different now," she said, and her voice seemed to sing in his ears. "1 feel as if 1 had escaped from some terrible trap! Steve," she said, her voice very low, "do you realize that we owe everything in the world to you? If 1 hadn't come out here, if we hadn't found you...."

  "Shush, child," said Steve. He didn't dare look at her; he kept his eyes deeply on the dying embers.

  "You're nice," she said unexpectedly, and for a moment laid her hand upon his. And still he sat motionless with his eyes on the coals.

  "Good night, Steve. Excuse my talking so much."

  "Good night."

  By the time he had delivered the O'Rileys at the Two Pine boarding house, he had made up his mind what he was going to do. He went first to Harry Weir, the local assayer, and dumped his bags of rock rubbish on Weir's floor.

  "You've got to do something for me, Harry?" he said.

  "When the best trout guide in the country says that, there's only one answer, Steve."

  Steve thanked his stars he had friends. "All right. Assay this worthless rip-rap first. Then you're going to buy the O'Rileys' right in the mountain this junk came from."

  "With whose money?" said Harry Weir skeptically.

  "Mine," said Hunter. "Only, my name is going to be kept out of the deal."

  "Sounds like a shenanigan," said Weir.

  "Call it what you like. You ought to know me well enough by this time to take a chance." There was a short wordy struggle, and an explanation or two. But in the
end Weir, indebted to Steve for more than one free pack to his favorite streams, agreed to all Steve asked.

  Next he went to Abe Cramp - a slouching, unshaved figure always to be found at Cramp's Two Pine corral. Just as Steve Hunter made a business of supplying transportation upon the mountain trails, Abe Cramp made a nice thing of horse trading with the trail men, who owe their whole existence to horses and mules.

  "Abe," said Steve, "if you still know where you can sell the Three Bar, you can have her now... lock, stock and barrel, name and brand, and 1 guarantee not to set up another pack outfit within a hundred miles in the next five years."

  "How much?" said Cramp.

  "Six thousand cash, today."

  Abe Cramp studied him. "1 won't horse trade you, Steve," he said at last. He masticated his straw, devouring it slowly. "I could easy beat you down, but I won't. I'll offer six if you want."

  There was a silence. Then: "Sold," said Hunter. The word came hard, but he had decided what he was going to do.

  The straw dropped from Abe Cramp's mouth. "You mean I've bought the Three Bar for six thousand?"

  "You heard me, Abe."

  Cramp took off his two-gallon hat and slammed it on the ground. "Then you're a fool!" he shouted. "You're a fool, you hear?"

  "Maybe 1 am," said Steve.

  "You've built you up the best pack outfit in the best stand this side of the backbone of the Rockies. You've got the best stock and the best equipment of any packer 1 ever saw, and I've seen them all. You get the cream of the fishermen, the cream of the deer hunters.. .they know your name, and they come to you, more of them every year. A few years more and you'll own this country, Steve! Don't you do it, don't you sell!"

  "I'm set on it, Abe."

  Abe stared. "You'll cuss hell out of yourself for this, Steve, someday." He led the way to the house.

  It took all day to get that deal straightened out, but there was a certified check for six thousand dollars in Steve Hunter's pocket when he pulled up in front of the Two Pine boarding house again. It was dusk, and in the unpainted board houses that line Two Pine's hundred-foot-wide-street, warm yellow lights were beginning to show. But no light showed in Steve Hunter's future as he sought out June O'Riley. When, at last, she sat beside him in his parked car, he knew that he had reached the moment he had dreaded, that he could no longer put off telling her the truth, as he knew it, about the Lost Dutchman's gold.