The Desert Fiddler

by Hamby, William H

  Noah reluctantly cashed in. He had begun with a dollar and got back $4.60.

  "You see," said Noah, clinking the silver in his hands as they moved away, "this is lots easier than work. The only reason I work for you is out of the kindness of my heart. I made that $4.60 in twenty minutes."

  "Here is craps." They had stopped at a table that looked like a gutted piano, with sides a foot above the bottom.

  "You take the dice"—Noah happened to be in line and got them as the last man lost—"and put down say a half dollar." He laid one on the line. "You throw the two dice. If seven comes up—— Ah, there!" he chuckled. "I done it." The face of the dice showed [3 and 4]. "You see I win." The dealer had thrown down a half dollar on top of Noah's. "Now, come, seven." Noah flung them again.

  Sure enough seven came up again. A dollar was pitched out to him. He left the two dollars lying. This time he threw eleven and won again. Four dollars! Noah was in great glee.

  "Let's go," urged Bob.

  "One more throw," Noah brought up a 6 this time.

  "Now," he explained, "I've got to throw until another 6 comes. If I get a seven before I do a six, they win." His next throw was a seven, and the dealer raked in the four dollars.

  "Oh, well," sighed Noah, "only fifty cents of that was mine, anyway. And the poor gamblers have to live.

  "This," he explained, stopping at a table waist high around which a circle of men stood with money and cards in front of them, "is Black Jack.

  "You put down the amount of money you want to bet. The banker deals everybody two cards, including himself. But both your cards are face down, while his second card is face up.

  "The game is to see who can get closest to 21. You look at your cards. All face cards count for ten; ace counts for either 1 or 11 as you prefer.

  "If your cards don't add enough, you can get as many more as you ask for. But if you ask for a card and it makes you run over 21, you lose and push your money over. Say you get a king and a 9—that is 19, and you stand on that, and push your cards under your money.

  "When all the rest have all the cards they want, the dealer turns his over. Say he has a 10 and a 8. He draws. If he gets a card that puts him over 21, he goes broke and pays everybody. But if he gets say 18—then he pays all those who are nearer 21 than he; but all who have less than 18 lose."

  While Noah had been explaining, he had been playing, and lost a dollar on each of two hands.

  They moved on to a chuck-a-luck game.

  "This, you see," said Noah, "is a sort of bird cage with three overgrown dice. You put your money on any one of these six numbers. He whirls the cage and shakes up the fat dice. They fall—and if one of the three numbers which come up is yours, you win. Otherwise—ouch!" Noah had played a dollar on the 5; and a 1, 2 and a 6 came up.

  As they moved away Noah was shaking his head disconsolately.

  "Money is like a shadow that soon flees away—and you have to hoe cotton in the morning."

  "Don't you know," said Bob, earnestly, "that everyone of these games give the house from 6 to 30 per cent., and that you are sure to lose in the end?"

  "Yeah," said Noah, wearily. "You're sure to die in the end, too; but that don't keep you from goin' on tryin' every day to make a livin' and have a little fun. It's all a game, and the old man with the mowin' blade has the last call."

  "But," persisted Bob, "when you earn a thing and get what you earn, it is really yours, and has a value and gives a pleasure that you can't get out of money that comes any other way."

  "Don't you believe it," Noah shook his head lugubriously. "The easier money comes the more I enjoy it. Only it don't never come. It goes. This here gamblin' business reminds me of an old dominecker hen we used to have. That hen produced an awful lot of cackle but mighty few eggs. It is what my dad would have called the shadow without the substance. But your blamed old tractor gives me a durned lot more substance than I yearn for."

  They were still pushing among the jostling crowd. There were more than a thousand men in the hall—and a few women. Soiled Mexicans passed through the jostle with trays on their heads selling sandwiches and bananas. Fragments of meat and bread and banana peelings were scattered upon the sawdust floor. It was a grimy scene. And yet Bob still acknowledged the tremendous pull of it—the raw, quick action of the stuff that life and death are made of.

  Noah nudged Bob and nodded significantly toward the bar, where Reedy with his three friends and two or three Mexicans, including Madrigal, were drinking.

  "He's cookin' up something agin you," said Noah in a low tone. "Better go over and talk to him. He's gettin' full enough to spill some of it."

  Bob took the suggestion and sauntered over toward the bar. As he approached, Reedy turned around and nodded blinkingly at him.

  "Say," Reedy leaned his elbows on the bar and spoke in a propitiatory tone, "I'sh sorry you went off in such a huff. Right good fello', I understand. If you'd asked me, I'd saved you lot of trouble and money on that lease." Reedy stopped to hiccough. "Even now, take your lease off your hands at half what it cost."

  "So?" Bob smiled sarcastically.

  "Well, hell," Reedy was nettled at the lack of appreciation of his generosity, "that's a good deal better than nothing."

  "My lease is not on the market," Bob replied, dryly.

  "Now look here!" Reedy half closed his plump eyes and nodded knowingly. "'Course you are goin' to sell—I got to have four more ranches to fill out my farm—and when I want 'em I get 'em, see? As Davy Crockett said to the coon, 'Better come on down before I shoot, and save powder.'"

  "Shoot," said Bob, contemptuously.

  "Now look here," Reedy lurched still closer to Bob, and put his plump fingers down on the bar as though holding something under his hand; "I got unlimited capital back of me—million dollars—two million—all I want. That's on 'Merican side—on this side—I got pull. See? Fifty ways I can squelch you—just like that." He squeezed his plump, soft hand together as though crushing a soft-shelled egg.

  "You are drunk," Bob said, disgustedly, "and talking through a sieve." He moved away from him and sauntered round the hall. At one of the tables he came upon Rodriguez, the man he was looking for.

  He looked more Spanish than Mexican, had a moustache but did not curl it, a thin face and soft brown eyes, and the pensive look of a poet who is also a philosopher.

  "Well?" Bob questioned in an undertone as they drifted outside of the gambling hall and stood in the shadows beyond the light of the open doors. "Did you learn anything?"

  Rodriguez nodded. "They have two, three plans to make you get out. Señor Madrigal is—what you call hem?—detec—detectave in Mexico. Ver' bad man. He work for Señor Jenkins on the side."

  Bob left his Mexican friend. He stood in the shadow of the great gambling hall for a moment, pulled in opposite directions by two desires. He remembered a red spot on Reedy Jenkins' cheek just under his left eye that he wanted to hit awfully bad. He could go back and smash him one that would knock him clear across the bar. On the other hand, he wanted to get on his horse and ride out into the silence and darkness of the desert and think. After all, smashing that red spot on Reedy's cheek would not save his ranch. He turned quickly down the street to where his horse was hitched.

  CHAPTER XI

  One of the hardest layers of civilization for a woman to throw off is the cook stove. She can tear up her fashion plates, dodge women's clubs, drop her books, forsake cosmetics and teas, and yet be fairly happy. But to the last extremity she clings to her cook stove.

  Imogene Chandler had her stove out in the open at a safe distance from the inflammable weed roof of the "house." The three joints of stovepipe were held up by being wired to two posts driven in the ground beside it.

  The girl alternately stuffed light, dry sticks into the stove box, and then lifted the lid of a boiling kettle to jab a fork into the potatoes to see if they were done. The Chandler larder was reduced to the point where Imogene in her cooking had to substitute things th
at would do for things that tasted good.

  Chandler, in from the field, filled a tin washbasin at the tank, set it on a cracker box, and proceeded to clean up for supper. He rolled his sleeves up far above his elbows and scrubbed all the visible parts of his body from the top of his bald head to the shoulder blade under the loose collar of his open-necked shirt. About the only two habits from his old life that clung to the ex-professor were his use of big words and soap.

  Chandler sat down at the little board table, also out in the open. It was after sundown and the heat was beginning to abate. As Imogene poured coffee into the pint tin cup beside his plate she looked down at him with protective admiration.

  "Dad, I'm proud of you. You've got a tan that would be the envy of an African explorer; and you are building up a muscle, too; you are almost as good a man in the field as a Chinese coolie—really better than a Mexican."

  "It has been my observation," said the ex-professor, tackling the boiled potatoes with a visible appetite, "that when a man quits the scholarly pursuits he instinctively becomes an agriculturist. Business is anathema to me; but I must confess that it gives me pleasure to watch the germination of the seed, and to behold the flower and fruitage of the soil."

  Imogene laughed. "It is the fruitage that I'm fond of—especially when it is a bale to the acre. And it is going to make that this year or more; I never saw a finer field of cotton."

  "It is doing very well," Chandler admitted with pride. "Yet, ah, perhaps there is one field better, certainly as good, and that is the American's north of here; the person you referred to as a fiddler."

  "Daddy," and under the tone of raillery was a trace of wistfulness, "we've lived like Guinea Negroes here for three years, and yet I believe you like it. I don't believe you'd go back right now as professor of Sanskrit at Zion College."

  The little professor did not reply, but remarked as he held out the cup for another pint of coffee:

  "I notice I sleep quite soundly out here, even when the weather is excessively hot."

  The girl smiled and felt fully justified in the change she had forced in his way of living.

  "I think," remarked Chandler, reflectively, "at the end of the month I'll let Chang Lee go. I think I can some way manage the rest of the season alone."

  "Perhaps," assented Imogene, soberly, as she began to pick up the knives and forks and plates. She had not told him that when Chang Lee's wages for June were paid it would leave them less than twenty dollars to get through the summer on. "I've been learning to irrigate the cotton rows and I can help," she said. "It will be a lot of fun."

  The ex-professor was vaguely troubled. He knew in a remote sort of way that their finances were at a low ebb. Imogene always attended to the business.

  "Do you suppose, daughter," he asked, troubled, "that it is practical for us to continue in our present environment for another season?"

  "Surest thing, you know," she laughed reassuringly. "Run along now to bed; you are tired." He sighed with a delicious sense of relief and sleepiness, and went.

  But Imogene was not tired enough either to sit still or to sleep. She got up and walked restlessly round the camp. Known problems and unknown longings were stirring uneasily in her consciousness.

  She stood at the edge of the field where the long rows of cotton plants, freshly watered, grew rank and green in the first intense heat of summer. There was a full moon to-night—a hazy, sleepy full moon with dust blown across its face creeping up over the eastern desert.

  Just a little while ago and it was all desert. Two years ago when they first came this cotton field was uneven heaps of blown sand, desert cactus, and mesquite—barren and forbidding as a nightmare of thirst and want. It had taken a year's work and nearly all their meagre capital to level it and dig the water ditches. And the next year—that was last year—the crop was light and the price low. They had barely paid their debts and saved a few hundred for their next crop. Now that was gone, and with it six hundred, the last dollar she could borrow at the bank. Just how they were going to manage the rest of the summer she did not know. And worst of all were these vague but persistent rumours and warnings that the ranchers were somehow to be robbed of their crops.

  She turned and walked back into the yard of the little shack and stood bareheaded looking at the moon, the desert wind in her face. Another summer of heat was coming swiftly now. She had lived through two seasons of that terrific heat when the sun blazed all day, day after day, and the thermometer climbed and climbed until it touched the 130 mark. And all these two years had been spent here at this shack, with its dirt yard and isolation.

  The desert had bit deeply into her consciousness. Even the heat, the wind-driven sand, the stillness, the aloneness of it had entered into her soul with a sort of fascination.

  "I'm not sorry," she shut her hands hard and pressed her lips close together, "even if we do lose—but we must not lose! We can't go on in poverty, either here or over there. We must not lose—we must not!"

  She turned her head sharply; something toward the road had moved; some figure had appeared a moment and then disappeared. A fear that was never wholly absent made her move toward the door of her own shack. A revolver hung on a nail there.

  And then out on the night stole the singing, quivering note of a violin. Instantly the fear was gone, the tension past, and the tears for the first time in all the struggle slipped down her cheeks. She knew now that for weeks she had been hoping he would come again.

  When the violin cords ceased to sing, Imogene clapped her hands warmly, and the fiddler rose from beside a mesquite bush and came toward her.

  "I'm glad you brought it this time," she said as he approached and sat down on a box a few feet away. "That was the best music I have heard for years."

  "The best?" he questioned.

  She caught the meaning in his emphasis and smiled to herself as she answered: "The best violin music." Although her face was in the shadow, the moonlight was on her hair and shoulders. Something in her figure affected him as it had that night when she stood in the doorway—some heroic endurance, some fighting courage that held it erect, and yet it was touched by a yearning as restless and unsatisfied as the desert wind. Bob knew her father was incapable of grappling alone with the problems of life. This project had all been hers; it was her will, her brain, her courage that had wrought the change on the face of this spot of desert. Yet how softly girlish as she sat there in the moonlight; and how alone in the heart of this sleeping desert in an alien country. He wished she had not qualified that praise of his playing. Bob knew very little about women.

  "How do you like being a cotton planter?" She was first to break the silence.

  "Oh, very well." He turned his eyes from her for the first time, looked down at his fiddle, and idly picked at one of the strings. "But of course I can't truthfully say I love manual labour. I can do it when there is something in it; but I much prefer a hammock and a shade and a little nigger to fan me and bring me tall glasses full of iced drinks."

  She laughed, for she knew already he had the reputation of being one of the best workers in the valley.

  "But this country has me," he added. "It fascinates me. When I make a fortune over here I'm going across on the American side and buy a big ranch.

  "You know"—he continued softly to strum on the violin strings—"this Imperial Valley seems to me like a magic spot of the tropics, some land of fable. Richer than the valley of the Nile it has lain here beneath the sea level for thousands of years, dead under the breath of the desert, until a little trickle of water was turned in from the Colorado River, and then it swiftly put forth such luxuriant wealth of food and clothes and fruit and flowers that its story sounds like the demented dreams of a bankrupt land promoter."

  "I am glad you like it," she said, "and I hope you'll get your share of the fabled wealth that it is supposed to grow—and, oh, yes, by the way, do you happen to need another Chinaman?"

  "No, I've got more than I can pay now."

&n
bsp; "We are going to let Chang Lee go the last of the month. He's a good Chinaman, and I wanted him to have a job."

  "Why let him go?"

  "We won't need him."

  "Won't need him!" Bob exclaimed. "With a hundred and sixty acres of cotton to irrigate and keep chopped out?"

  "I can do a lot of the irrigating"—the girl spoke a little evasively—"and daddy can manage the rest."

  He knew this was another case of exhausted funds.

  "Can't you borrow any more?"

  She laughed a frank confession.

  "You guessed it. We haven't money to pay him. I've borrowed six hundred on the crop, and can't get another dollar."

  He sat silent for several minutes looking off toward the cotton fields that would cry for water to-morrow in their fight against the eternal desert that brooded over this valley, thinking of her pluck. It made him ashamed of any wavering thought that ever scouted through his own mind.

  He stood up. "And are you going to see it through?"

  Alone beside the field as the moon rose she had wavered in doubt; but the answer came now with perfect assurance.

  "Most surely."

  "So am I," he said. "Good-night."

  But before he turned she put out her hand to touch his violin—her fingers touched his hand instead.

  "Please—just once more," she asked.

  He laughed whimsically as he sat down on the box and drew the bow.

  "I'm proud of the human race," he said, "that fights for bread and still looks at the stars."

  He began to play: he did not know what. It might have been something he had heard; but anyway to-night it was his and hers, the song of the rose that fought the desert all day for its life and then blossomed with fragrance in the night.

  At the sound of the violin a man sitting on the edge of the canal by the cottonwood trees stirred sharply. There was a guitar across his knee. He had been waiting for the sound of voices to cease; and now the accursed fiddle was playing again. He spat vindictively into the stream.

  "Damn the Americano!"