Meeting his eyes, I became convinced that he was speaking out of the only faith he knew. “Very well,” I nodded. “If my client gets, say, fifteen per cent of the value of gross production — ”
I had thought that Bedlington would fence with me over the amount, but he didn’t. “Let’s be exact,” he interrupted. “I will agree to give him fifteen per cent of the value of the gold extracted from the mines. Is that satisfactory?”
There was a queer glint in his eyes as he spoke, so I reflected before answering. Without knowing too much about mining costs, I could see that Potter would be getting the equivalent of at least thirty per cent of the net profits. In terms of dollars, he would get hundreds of thousands of them annually; and even though more was possibly due him, I could not see that he would have a right to feel deprived.
“All right,” I finally said. “But if you ever welsh, we’ll take the gold itself at this end of the line.”
In the course of celebrating that victory we ran across Rogue River Pete. The lion of the moment, because he had given the town its latest man for breakfast, the big roustabout was glowing with drink and good fellowship.
“Howdy, Judge. Hello there, Terry. How’s the old Injun killer, Seth?” Every time I met Pete he insisted on buying me a drink in return for the free ride I had given him out of Three Deuces. “Here, Short-fuse,” he now said, “give the judge and the other boys what they want, and don’t try to wish off any of that Zuni cookin’ whiskey. The judge is from Maryland, and he’ll drill a man that tries to give him anythin’ but real, sure-’nough rye.”
Short-fuse was now tending bar in the Happy Hunting Ground, although it was understood that this was a mere stopgap until he came into his own as a mining tycoon. He served us with the air of a man dispensing hospitality rather than selling merchandise. Then he got a light from me for his cigar.
“How’s things goin’ on the claim, Baltimore?”
“The gold’s safer there than in a bank,” I answered. “Meanwhile I haven’t quite decided whether to sell or chase capital. Are you still working your claim on the side?”
“Nope. I quit that after I’d dug out that bit of easy placer stuff I had, because one man workin’ in hard rock don’t get his time back. So now I’m just holdin’ on and lettin’ the minin’ companies come to me.” Short-fuse blew a smoke ring, put his cigar back in his mouth and winked. “It’s like what the chippie said when she hit an army camp on payday. I got it, and they got to have it, so I’ll stand around and wait for them to shell out.”
Pete, who had been sharing his high spirits with some fellows at the other end of the bar, now rejoined us. “Say, Short-fuse,” he interrupted our professional discussion, “did I ever tell you how the judge here got me out of Three Deuces when Meadowbloom — that’s the squaw I had there, not the one I got here — done took my horse for the run to Powder Keg?”
It was probable that Short-fuse had heard the story, although it wasn’t exactly an old one, as Pete then related it. There were details which hadn’t previously been brought to my attention, including Pete’s personal encounter with the grizzly bear that had frightened the Foster equipage off the road.
“That b’ar come tearin’ after that wagon with that pretty gal of the preacher’s squealin’ and the preacher lookin’ like he wasn’t so sure that God was takin’ care of him as preachers generally let on to be. I was havin’ a hell of a time tryin’ to get in a shot, with our team rarin’ like they was fixin’ to climb trees, and every time I almost got a bead drawed old Hangtown Jennie’d grab my arm and beg me to pass the jug, which I wasn’t about to do, knowin’ she was scared enough to drink the whole quart.”
Pete emptied his glass before completing his sketch of this frenzied scene. “Well, just as I was about thinkin’ I’d have to jump out and take my chances on the ground, the judge here ca’ms the nags and swings ’em around so that I’ve got a square shot out the window. He done it so cute that he give the preacher’s buggy room to squeeze by, and he done it so sharp that it throwed Jennie between the seats of the coach, and her bustle got jammed and held her out of my hair, so’s I didn’t have to worry about her gettin’ the jug any more. ‘Now, Pete,’ the judge calls down from the driver’s seat, ca’m as if we was just havin’ target practice, ‘put one right between the eyes.’
“I couldn’t hardly miss,” Pete modestly pointed out, “as the varmint wasn’t no farther away than from me to Blackfoot Terry there. Well, we scooped up the preacher and the gal, which was too scared to drive any more by themselves, and went on into Chuckwalla. We split up there, of course, and I didn’t see none of ’em again till I heard about this camp and come on down here, like half the other folks in the West.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Seth asked proudly. “There ain’t nothin’ to match it anywhere in the country, so they’re all flockin’ in like ducks to wild rice.”
“That’s sure right,” Pete concurred. “When I come along the judge was already here, then the preacher tails me into camp, and this afternoon a wagonload of gals pulls in and the one that ain’t a gal exactly is Hangtown Jennie.”
This intelligence was confirmed a couple of hours later. By then at the Glory Hole, I was in the act of lifting a drink when a wallop on the back made me spill most of it. Looking around, I took off my hat with the hand which didn’t have whiskey all over it.
“Why, Jennie; it’s nice to see you,” I said.
“I’d just as soon see you as about anything but a drink or a dollar,” she beamed in return. “Howdy, Terry; long time no see. Get your carcass out of the way, Pete, and let me belly up. Who’s the jigger in the leather pants and face fur, Baltimore?”
“Oh, just the man who discovered this bonanza.” Seth, who had been waiting to have his distinction made known, cocked his head at that and slid his quid from one cheek to the other. “This is Seth Potter, Jennie.”
“Well, shove over and let me stand next to him,” she ordered. “Him and me’s the only ones here that’s really old enough to know good liquor and to have sense enough to come in out of that goddam rain out there, so we ought to stick together.”
Chapter 13
HAVING JUST RETURNED from a freighting expedition to El Paso, I was going through my bills of lading when Sam Wheeler entered the office. “Marco Polo back from the mysterious East,” he greeted me. “Were you able to swap the natives buffalo chips for spices, sandalwood and Circassian slave girls?”
“I got everything our clients ordered.” I waited until my partner had his feet on his desk. “What’s new along the quays of Sometimes Creek?”
“According to my way of thinking,” Sam said, as he took off his glasses to polish them, “the most significant piece of news is that we own a new building, not finished inside.”
“No comment yet, but a question,” I said. “How did we get it?”
“By saving a fellow mortal from having his gizzard cut out by a Dido of our Western wilds, Baltimore. Do you remember that Dutchman, Von der Donck, who was building that big shack here on Beaver Lodge?”
“On the other side of Apache,” I nodded. “I hardly know Von der Donck, though.”
“Most Dutchmen have infirm bats in their belfries,” Wheeler stated, “and I’d have said this one did, too, if he hadn’t shown a preference for my company. In any case he finally confided to me that what he was building was a gymnasium; a turn something, he called it.”
“Turnverein” I said, remembering the numerous Germans of Baltimore and the places where they solemnly exercised. “My God! Did he expect a bunch of prospectors to spend their evenings on the horizontal bars?”
“He intended to rescue them from saloons, bordellos and gambling hells by substituting a program of healthful recreation.” Sam considered the words he had just spoken in moody silence, then he brightened. “But Clarabelle came along and saved him from disillusionment, though to get the full benefit of unfractured dreams, he had to be saved from Clarabelle.
“Sh
e’s Jennie’s latest rival,” Wheeler went on, in answer to my look of inquiry. “She hove in from ’Frisco, complete with her mac and a covey of syndicate girls while you were away. She has, I should say, Jennie’s breadth of beam without her breadth of tolerance for human frailty.”
“Had Von der Donck been frail, Sam?”
“Frail enough in the brain to have married her in their younger days, but robust enough to have kept on the dodge ever since, which is perhaps why he prized physical fitness,” my partner said. “But of all this I knew nothing until Clarabelle blew into town and the Dutchman came to me in a sweat cold enough to chill beer. ‘Veeler,’ he said — and if they’d made a telegraph operator out of Tacitus, they wouldn’t have come up with a man who could put facts into a neater nutshell, Baltimore — ‘Veeler, my voman is here, and I need a horse.’”
At this juncture Sam reached into his desk and fished out a piece of paper. “I told him I’d lend him a cayuse, but he made it plain that he didn’t want just any old nag; he had to have a blooded steed, capable of speed and endurance. Then he explained that he was not coming back, had spent all his available funds on his Turnverein and wanted to make a swap. What I hold in my hands is a record of that barter.”
“Men that have been swinging picks all day will lift a couple of ounces of whiskey without protest, and some of them will exercise to the extent of striking matches on the seats of their pants,” I remarked. “What will we do with even an unfinished gymnasium?”
“Let’s take a look at it,” Sam suggested, “and I’ll show you.”
The building formerly owned by Von der Donck was shaped like a shoe box. The roof and walls had been completed, but nothing had been done to the interior, which resembled a barn without a loft.
“We could use it for freight storage,” I said, after inspecting it.
“Tradesman,” Wheeler sneered. “No soul. No feeling for culture. Now I can see this as a temple of the seven arts, starting off with the cancan. Dead Warrior has long needed the finer things of life and will pony up for them.”
It was shortly before Christmas that the Anything Goes Variety Hall was opened. It proved as popular a feature of Dead Warrior’s social life as Sam had prophesied. It was also responsible for my acquaintance with Evalinda deVere.
She came to town billed as an aerial artist. Whatever that term might have meant to other people, to Evalinda it stood for romping around the stage and occasionally swinging across it on a rope in such a manner as to give her audience inside information as to what was beneath her abbreviated skirts. Meanwhile she sang, told jokes and exchanged comments with those she singled out for that honor.
A detached observer might have decided that her great success was due more to her lively dark eyes, long trim legs and bouncing vitality than to her skill, but there was no such fellow present. She captured Dead Warrior with her first performance.
After it Sam and I played host to the little traveling troupe of which she was the star. As this was our initial experience in the role of theatrical managers, we were very earnest in our endeavor to be good hosts. In this we seemed to be successful. Our guests showed every sign of enjoying themselves as much as we did, Evalinda included. It therefore appeared possible that I could arrange to see her again before she left town.
Unlike Von der Donck’s dream, this one was not without fruition. Since Terry had moved into the recently completed Apache House — justly advertised as the largest and most luxurious in the Southwest — I had been in solitary possession of my house. I was accordingly surprised, as I walked up the path to it early in the afternoon of the next day, to see smoke rising from the chimney.
I had been in the field inspecting the line of a projected town waterworks and had stopped to exchange my gun belt for a shoulder holster before going on to the office. Nobody then thought of locking his house, so my astonishment concerning the smoke was only mild. I was prepared to find that some friend had stopped by to make himself a pot of coffee. I was not prepared to hear a feminine voice emerging from the bedroom.
“Is that you, Baltimore? I hadn’t expected you so early or I would have had my bath and been dressed.”
Evalinda was curled up on my bed with a blanket thrown over her. Two valises, her property presumptive, were on the floor next to high, red leather shoes. A large plumed hat was on my dresser.
“I don’t like hotels,” Miss deVere explained, while I was taking note of these things, “and I can’t stand living with girls, the way you have to do on the road, so I thought I’d move in.”
After hanging my gun belt on the buckhorn rack which held my rifle, I returned to stand in the doorway once more. “What took you so long to decide?” I asked her.
With the hearty laugh which had conquered all at the Anything Goes, she sat up. “I had to sleep with that Belle Thorndyke, only I couldn’t, because she snores and steals all the covers. Besides, I like you, and I usually move in with the theater manager if he’s nice and hasn’t got a girl. That’s what I wanted to find out about you, on account of I don’t think it’s right to take a girl’s man when I’m only going to be here a couple of weeks.”
Busy schooling my mind to acceptance of this dazzling development, I blinked at her. “You might simply borrow a man.”
Evalinda, who had begun rubbing her back against the ironwork of the bedstead, shook her head. “I might spoil things for a rooster and his hen so they’d never get together again, and men are too easy to get out West here for a girl to have to be mean about ’em.” Starting to unbutton the back of her dress, she smiled at me coaxingly. “See if that water I put on the kitchen stove is hot yet, will you, sweetie, and then come here and scratch my back. I’ve got a tickle there that just won’t quit.”
“Are you planning to make the stage your career?” I asked, as we sat at breakfast the next morning.
“Have some more coffee and stop talking like a nut,” she urged me. “I can’t sing, dance or do good acrobatics, let alone act. I’m plenty of girl, though, so the boys out here get their money’s worth; but I couldn’t slide by on just that anywheres else.”
She may not have been a promising actress, but she certainly knew how to make an omelet. “How did you get into the business to begin with, then?” I asked, when I had taken another appreciative mouthful.
“My folks are God-fearing sodbusters back in Kansas,” Evalinda said. I had seen a few old women smoke before but never a young one, and I watched with interest while she lit a cigarette. “But whilst they were fearing God, I was fearing moving out of our woodchuck hole into the one owned by the farmer that churched me. I got a job as a biscuit shooter at the station restaurant until I could pay my way to Dodge City, picked out a lot prettier name than the one that was dug out of the Bible for me, and got into this variety hall racket.”
Rising, I chose the least foul-smelling of my pipes and filled it. The girl could make pretty fair money at such places as Dead Warrior and Dodge City, but I knew that the returns from playing in a lot of the scattered frontier towns must be pretty small. Thinking of the interminable stage rides under all weather conditions which traveling performers constantly had to endure, I shook my head.
“I still think you’d do better elsewhere. Have you ever actually tried any other part of the country?”
A lock of her unpinned hair fell in front of her face when she nodded, and she swept it out of her eyes. “I tried it in New York one winter, but a ham variety girl don’t rate with the middle-grade whores there, and here I own about every town I prance in. Hell, honey, I’d have dropped it and got married, if I hadn’t been having so much fun, though naturally I’ll do it by and by.”
A bachelor has two problems. One is to get a companionable girl into his premises, and the other is to get her out of them. Even as an abstract topic, the subject of matrimony was one I preferred to avoid.
“Time enough for that,” I mumbled.
Reading me, she gave her infectious guffaw again. “Look who’s a scare
-cat,” she jeered. “Put your tail down, buck; nobody’s shooting at you. When I do get hitched, it won’t be to somebody that’s young enough to worry about me, and he’ll have to have a lot more dough than I think you’ve got.”
Evalinda stayed with me for nearly a week, inclusive of Christmas and the day after it, which was devoted to horse racing. The quarter race had long been a Dead Warrior specialty, and the qualities of the various coursers had become well enough known for us to have established classes of sorts. Much to Evalinda’s satisfaction, my Spanish Monte was a contender in the swiftest class; and certainly a horse never had a more vociferous rooter.
Spanish Monte’s chief competition came from Dick Jackson’s Masthead, though Dick and I didn’t mount the animals ourselves. The custom was to use the half-grown scions of Mexican laborers, thus insuring a fairly even balancing of weight in addition to allowing the owners to enjoy the spectacle. On this occasion I enjoyed it very much. My horse won three heats out of four, to the delight of Evalinda and the chagrin of Dick, whom I took extra pleasure in beating because of the personal issue between us.
Jackson, who had tended to patronize me as a greenhorn in Three Deuces, had not accustomed himself to the fact that in Dead Warrior it was I who was the old-timer. We were drinking cronies, on the score of finding each other good company, without at the same time being good friends. Because I knew he resented it, I was not averse to making it clear that he was merely a member of our crew, not the leader he preferred to be. He reacted by looking for ways in which to put me at a disadvantage.
From the first it had not sat well with him that I had bedded down with the toast of Dead Warrior. He had joined Evalinda and myself oftener than he had any business doing. Moreover, he flirted openly with her, and not without avail. Evalinda’s idea of a nice, cozy gathering was herself and as many men as could crowd around her. Not lukewarm herself, she liked ardor; and Dick’s blatant lusting appealed to her.
“That newspaper Johnnie’s sure got hot pants for me,” she happily confided over a bedtime snack we were having in my kitchen.
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