The Desert Fiddler

by Hamby, William H

  Then suddenly, but softly, a guitar thrummed, and a voice with the half-wailing cadence of the Spanish took up the melody.

  Bob stood still, the blood crowding his veins until his face was hot and his whole body prickled. This was Madrigal, the Mexican Jew.

  The song ended. Faintly came the clapping of hands, and the ripple of a girl's laughter. Bob turned angrily and walked swiftly back up the road, walked clear past his own ranch without noticing, and finally turned aside by a clump of cottonwood trees along the levee of the main irrigation canal. The water, a little river here, ran swiftly, muddily, black under the desert stars. Bob lifted his fiddle and flung it into the middle of the stream.

  The heat of his anger was gone. He felt instantly cold, and infinitely lonesome. There upon the muddy water floated away the thousand songs of the hills—the melody, the ecstasy, the colour and light of his early youth.

  With sudden repentance he turned and dashed down the bank after the hurrying current. The fall is rapid here, and the fiddle was already far down the stream. He ran stumblingly, desperately, along the uneven bank, dodging willows and arrowweed, stopping now and again to peer up and down the stream.

  It was nowhere in sight. A sort of frenzy seized him. He had a queer fancy that in that moment of anger he had thrown away his soul—all of him that was not bread and dollars. He must get it back—he must! Another dash, and again he stopped on the bank. Something darker than the current bobbed upon the muddy water. Without a moment's hesitancy he plunged into the stream and waded waist deep into the middle of the current.

  Yes, it was his violin. Back on the bank, dripping wet, he hugged it to him like a little girl with a doll that was lost and is found.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The next morning at breakfast Noah Ezekiel remarked:

  "I wonder where that skunk got the money."

  "What skunk and what money?" Bob was pouring sirup on a pancake, a product of much patience both on his part and the Chinese cook's.

  "Jenkins." Noah answered both questions in one word. "Not long ago he had to borrow a dime for a doughnut. Last night he was at the Red Owl gambling with both fists. And I heard he's bought altogether ten thousand acres in leases. 'Verily,' as dad used to say, 'the sinner flourisheth like a thorn tree.'"

  "Do you know if he has bought Chandler's?" Bob asked, casually, not meeting Noah's eye.

  "No, but I reckon he will. He seems out for a clean-up."

  "If you see the Chandlers," suggested Rogeen, "advise them not to sell."

  Noah Ezekiel reached for the towel to wipe his mouth, and shook his head.

  "I ain't strong on giving advice. I believe in doin' as you'd be done by, and most all the advice I ever got was as hard to take as castor oil. Advice is like givin' a dog ipecac—it may break him of suckin' eggs, but it sure is hard on the dog."

  Bob laughed and got up and started to work.

  The first Saturday in June Rogeen and Noah quit at noon, for the rush was over.

  "I reckon," Noah insinuated, suavely, "if you are feelin' right good I might strike you for another five to-night."

  "Certainly," said Bob. "But look here, Noah, you ought not to gamble away your wages."

  Noah Ezekiel pulled a long face.

  "You sound like my dad. And I ain't fully persuaded you are enough of a saint to preach."

  "You are incorrigible, Zeke," Bob laughed. "And I think I'll go with you to-night to the Red Owl."

  Noah shook his head. "I wouldn't advise it. Gamblin' ain't to be recommended to employers. It's liable to put wages in japordy."

  "I am not going to gamble," said Bob. "I am looking for a man—a couple of them, in fact."

  Reedy Jenkins had returned to his office about two o'clock after making a complete circuit of his leases. The crop looked fine—so everybody told him. He knew little about cotton, but Ah Sing was a wonderful farmer—he knew how to handle the Chinese labourer.

  Then he looked at his watch and frowned. He wished that blankety-blank Mexican would be more prompt in keeping his appointments. He wanted to get away. He was to drive to El Centro for a visit with Mrs. Barnett and then to-night he would return for a little recreation across the line.

  It was nearly four when Madrigal finally appeared, wearing an expensive white summer suit and a jaunty straw hat. "He is a handsome devil," thought Reedy, eying him with disfavour because of his lateness. The Mexican took off his straw hat attached to a buttonhole by a silk cord, and pushed up his black pompadoured hair.

  "Have you got the Chandler ranch yet?" Jenkins came directly to the point.

  "Not yet, señor." Madrigal's bold, dark eyes smiled with supreme confidence. "Not yet—but soon."

  The Mexican stood up and returned his hat to his head. He put up his hands as though strumming a guitar, turned up his eyes languishingly, and hummed a flirting air.

  "If this, señor," he said, breaking off, "does not win the señorita, we will try—what you call hem—direct action. You shall have your ranch, never fear."

  "And that damned Rogeen—what of him?"

  The Mexican smiled sinisterly. "He get news tonight that make heem lose much sleep.

  "Now may I trouble Señor Jenkins for fifty dollar?"

  Reedy grumbled, but paid. The Mexican lifted his hand, pressed it to his heart, and bowed with mocking gallantry.

  "Until to-night, señor."

  Lolita tries her wiles on Percy.

  CHAPTER IX

  Reedy Jenkins and Mrs. Barnett sat in a cool, shadowed corner of the porch. Reedy took a plump yellow cigar from his vest pocket, and with a deferential bow:

  "Will you permit me?"

  "Certainly, Mr. Jenkins." Mrs. Barnett spoke in a liberal-minded tone. "I do not object at all to the fragrance of a good cigar—especially out of doors."

  "It is a vile habit," said Jenkins, deprecatingly, as he began to puff. "But after a fellow has worked hard on some big deal, and is all strung up, it seems to offer a sort of relaxation. Of course, I think a man ought to smoke in reason. We are coarse brutes at the best—and need all the refining influences we can get."

  "I think it is bad for the throat," said Evelyn Barnett. "That is what I tell Uncle Crill. He smokes entirely too much."

  Uncle Crill was absent. He usually was. The old chap was willing for Evy to save his digestion within reason—but not his soul.

  "My dear friend," Reedy made a rather impetuous gesture with his right hand toward the demure widow, "it was splendid of you to persuade your uncle to lend me that money for the big deal. It was the sort of thing that one never forgets. We have plenty of friends willing to help us spend our money, but only a few, a very few loyal ones, willing to help us make it.

  "Depend upon it, my dear young lady, I'll not forget that favour—never. And as I promised before I shall give you personally one fourth of the profits."

  Mrs. Barnett gave her head a little depreciating twist and smoothed the dress over her right knee.

  "That will be very generous of you, Mr. Jenkins. But of course one does not do things for one's friends for money. Not but I can use it—to do good with," she hastened.

  "My poor husband would have left me a comfortable fortune in my own right if it had not been for the meddlesomeness of some one who had no business to interfere.

  "Mr. Barnett was a mine owner—and a most excellent business man. He had large interests in Colorado. One mine he was going to sell. An old gentleman and his daughter were just ready to buy it. The papers were all drawn, and they were to pay over their money that evening. But some horrid young man, a wandering fiddler or something, got to meddling and persuaded them not to trade.

  "It was an awful loss to poor Tom. He was to have had $60,000 out of the sale—and he never got one cent out of that mine, not a cent."

  "What did they do to that fellow that broke up the trade?" asked Reedy, puffing interestedly at his cigar.

  "Oh, Mr. Barnett said they taught him a lesson that would keep him from spoiling any
more trades." Mrs. Barnett laughed. And then accusingly: "Isn't it queer how mean some people are. Now just that little interference from that meddlesome stranger kept me from having a small fortune." A deep sigh. "And one can do so much good with money. Just think if I had that money how many poor people around here I could help. I hear there are families living across the line in little shacks—one or two rooms with dirt floors—and no bathroom. Isn't it awful? And women, too!"

  Reedy twisted his chair about so he looked squarely at the widow. The sun had gone down, and the quick twilight was graying the row of palm trees that broke the skyline to the south. Jenkins was in a hurry to get away, but his visit was not quite rounded out.

  "You must be very lonely," he said with a deep, sad voice—"since your husband died. Loneliness—ah loneliness! is the great ache of the human heart."

  "Y-e-s. Oh, yes," Mrs. Barnett did not sound utterly desolate. "But of course, Mr. Barnett being away so much——" There was a significant pause. "He was an excellent man—a good business man, but you know. Well, some people are more congenial than others. We never had a cross word in our lives. But—well—our tastes were different, you know."

  Reedy smoked and nodded in appreciative silence. The dusk came fast. Mrs. Barnett rustled her starched skirts and sighed.

  "You know, Mr. Jenkins," she began on a totally different subject, "it has been such a pleasure to me to meet someone out here in this God-forsaken country with fine feelings—one who loves the higher things of life."

  "Thank you, Mrs. Barnett." Reedy bowed in all seriousness.

  A moment later when he took his leave he held her hand a thought longer than necessary, and pressed it as though in a sympathetic impulse for her loneliness—or his—or maybe just because.

  It was dark as Reedy threw the clutch into high and put his foot on the accelerator. He was out of town too quick to be in danger of arrest for speeding. He was late. The three others who were to seek recreation for the evening with him would be waiting.

  And biting the end of his cigar he said fervently:

  "Thank God for Jim Crill—and his niece."

  Reedy's three friends were waiting—but dinner was ready. They had ordered a special dinner at the Pepper Tree Hotel, served out in a little pergola in the back yard.

  They were all hearty eaters, but not epicures; and anyway they did not take time to taste much. From where they sat they could look out between the latticed sides of the pergola across the Mexican line, and see above and beyond the squat darker buildings a high arch of winking electric lights.

  That was the Red Owl.

  And while they talked jerkily and broadly of cotton and real estate—and women, their thoughts were over there with those winking lights.

  Just across the line there was the old West again—the West of the early Cripple Creek days, of Carson City and Globe. Still wide open, still raw, still unashamed.

  Over there underneath these lights, in that great barnlike structure, were scores of tables across which fortunes flowed every night. There men met in the primitive hunt for money—quick money, and won—and lost, and lost, and lost.

  There, too, the tinkle of a piano out of tune, the blare of a five-piece orchestra, and the raucous singing of girls who had lost their voices as significantly as other things. And beyond that, along shadowy corridors, were other girls standing or sitting in doorways—lightly dressed.

  "Well, are you fellows through?" Reedy had pushed back his chair. "Let's go."

  CHAPTER X

  It was perhaps an hour later that Bob Rogeen went down the main street of the Mexican town, also headed for the Owl. Off this main street only a few lights served to reveal rather than dissipate the night. But under the dimness Mexicali was alive—a moving, seething, passionate sort of aliveness. The sidewalks were full, the saloons were busy. In and out of the meat shops or the small groceries occasionally a woman came and went. But the crowd was nearly all men—Mexicans, Chinamen, American ranchers and tourists, Germans, Negroes from Jamaica, Filipinos, Hindus with turbans. All were gathered in this valley of intense heat—this ancient bed of the sea now lower than the sea—not because of gold mines or oil gushers, but for the wealth that grew from the soil: the fortunes in lettuce, in melons, in alfalfa, and in cotton.

  "Odd," thought Bob, "that the slowest and most conservative of all industries should find a spot of the earth so rich that it started a stampede almost like the rush to the Klondike, of men who sought sudden riches in tilling the soil."

  Across the way from a corner saloon came the twang of a mandolin; and half a dozen Mexican labourers began singing a Spanish folk song. In a shop at his right a Jap girl sold soda water; in another open door an old Chinaman mended shoes; and from another came the click of billiard balls. But most of the crowd was moving toward the Owl.

  As Bob stepped inside the wide doors of the gambling hall the scene amazed him. There were forty tables running—roulette, blackjack, craps, stud poker—and round them men crowded three to five deep. Down the full length of one side of the room ran a bar nearly a hundred and fifty feet long, and in the rear end of the great barnlike structure thirty or forty girls, most of them American, sang and danced and smoked and drank with whosoever would buy.

  Bob stood to one side of the surging crowd that milled round the gaming tables, and watched. There was no soft-fingered, velvet-footed glamour about this place. No thick carpets, rich hangings, or exotic perfumes. Most of the men were direct from the fields with the soil of the day's work upon their rough overalls—and often on their faces and grimy hands. The men who ran the games were in their shirt sleeves, alert, sweatingly busy; some of them grim, a few predatory, but more of them easily good-natured. The whole thing was swift, direct, businesslike. Men were trying to win money from the house; and the house was winning money from them. This was raw gambling, raw drinking, raw vice. It was the old Bret Harte days multiplied by ten.

  And yet there was a fascination about it. Bob felt it. It is idiotic to deny that gambling, which is the lure of quick money reduced to minutes and seconds, has not a fascination for nearly all men. As Bob stood leaning with his back against the bar—there was no other place to lean, not one place in that big hall to sit down—the scene filled him with the tragedy of futile trust in luck.

  All these men knew that a day's work, a bale of cotton, a crate of melons, a cultivator—positive, useful things—brought money, positive, useful returns. And yet they staked that certainty on a vague belief in luck—and always, and always lost the certainty in grabbing for the shadow.

  Most of these men were day labourers, clerks, small-salaried men. It cost a thousand dollars a day to run this house, and it made another thousand dollars in profits. Two thousand dollars—a thousand days' hard work squandered every night by the poor devils who hoped to get something easy. And some of them squandered not merely one day's work but a month's or six months' hard, sweaty toil flipped away with one throw of the dice or one spin of the ball.

  While Bob's eyes watched the ever-shifting crowd that moved from table to table he saw Rodriguez, the man for whom he was searching. He was with Reedy Jenkins and three others coming from that end of the building devoted to alleged musical comedy. Besides the natty Madrigal, the sad-looking Rodriguez and Reedy, there were a Mexican and an American Bob did not know. All of them except Rodriguez wore expensive silk shirts and panama hats, and had had several drinks and were headed for more. Reedy, pink and expansive, chuckling and oratorical, was evidently the host. He was almost full enough and hilarious enough to do something ridiculous if the occasion offered.

  After two more rounds of drinks the party started for the gaming tables. The crowd was too thick for them to push their way in as a body, so they scattered. Reedy bought ten dollars' worth of chips at a roulette table, played them in stacks of twenty, and lost in three minutes. As he turned away he caught sight of Bob Rogeen and came across to him.

  "Hello, Cotton-eyed Joe," he said with drunken jocularity, "l
et's have a drink."

  "Thanks," replied Bob, "my wildest dissipation is iced rain water."

  Bob just then caught sight of Noah Ezekiel and moved away from Reedy Jenkins. He felt it safer—especially for Reedy, to stay out of reach of him.

  Noah Ezekiel's lank form was leaning against a roulette table, a stack of yellow chips in front of him.

  "Hello," said the hill billy as Bob edged his way up to his side.

  "How is it going?" asked Bob.

  "Fine," answered Noah, carefully laying five chips in the shape of a star. "I got a system and I'm going to clean 'em up."

  Bob smiled and watched. The wheel spun around. The ball slowed and dropped on 24. Noah's magical star spread around 7. The dealer reached over and wiped in his five chips.

  "You see," Noah explained, taking it for granted Bob knew nothing of the games, "this is ruelay. You play your money on one number and then rue it." The hill billy chuckled at his pun. "There are 36 numbers on the table," he pointed a long forefinger, "and there are 36 numbers on the wheel. You put your money or chip—the chips are five cents apiece—on one number, and if the ball stops at that number on the wheel, you win 35 times what you played."

  "But if it doesn't stop on your number?" said Bob.

  "Then you are out of luck." Noah Ezekiel had again begun to place his chips.

  "Of course," he explained, "you play this thing dozens of ways; one to two on the red or black, or you can play one to three on the first, second or third twelve. Or you can play on the line between two numbers, and if either number wins you get 17 chips."

  Noah won this time. The number in the centre of his star came up and he got 67 chips.

  "Better quit now, hadn't you?" suggested Bob.

  "Nope—just beginning to rake 'em in," replied Noah.

  "Wish you would," said Bob, "and show me the rest of the games."