by B. M. Bower
Can you picture Casey Ryan rocking that child to sleep? I can’t—yes, I can too, and there’s something in the picture that holds back the laugh you think will come.
Before she gave her final wriggle and cheeped her last little cheep, Babe had to be carried over and held down where she could kiss mamma good night. Casey got rather white around the mouth, then. But he didn’t say a word. Indeed, he had said mighty little since that fourth blow of the double-jack; just enough to get along intelligently, with what he had to do. He hadn’t even told the Little Woman he was sorry.
So Babe was asleep and tucked in her bed, and Casey turned down the light and asked perfunctorily if there was anything else he could do, and had started for the door. And then—
“Casey Ryan,” called the Little Woman, with the teasing note in her voice. “Casey Ryan, come back here and listen to me. You are not going off like that to swear at yourself all night. Sit down in that chair and listen to me!”
Casey sat down, swallowing hard. All the Casey Ryan nonchalance was gone,—never had been with him, in fact, while he faced that Little Woman. Somehow she had struck him humble and dumb, from the very beginning. I wish I knew how she did it; I’d like to try it sometime myself.
“Casey Ryan, it’s hard for a woman to own herself in the wrong, especially to a man,” she said, when he had begun to squirm and wonder what biting words she would say. “I’ve always thought that I had as good nerve as any one. I have, usually. But that double-jack scared the life out of me after the first blow, and I thought I wouldn’t let on. I couldn’t admit I was afraid. I was terribly ashamed. I knew you’d never miss, but I was scared, just the same. And like a darn fool I pushed the drill away from me just as you struck. It was coming down—you couldn’t change it, man alive. You’d aimed true at the drill, and—the drill wasn’t just there at the moment. Serves me right. But it’s tough on you, old boy—having to do the cooking for three of us while I’m laid up!”
I’m sure I can’t see how Casey Ryan ever got the name of being a devil with the ladies. He certainly behaved like a yap then, if you get my meaning. He gave the Little Woman a quick, unwinking stare, looked away from her shamedly, reached for his plug of tobacco, took away his hand, swallowed twice, shuffled his feet and then grunted—I can use no other word for it:
“Aw, I guess I c’n stand it if you can!”
He made a motion then to rise up and go to his own camp where he would undoubtedly think of many tender, witty things that he would like to have spoken to the Little Woman. But she was watching him. She saw him move and stopped him with a question.
“Casey Ryan, tell me the truth about that tunnel. Do you think it’s ever going to strike the ore body at all?”
Start Casey off on the subject of mining and you have him anchored and interested for an hour, at least. The Little Woman had brains, you must see that.
“Well, I don’t want to discourage you, ma’am,” Casey said reluctantly, the truth crowding against his teeth. “But I’d ’a’ gone in under that iron capping, if I’d been doing it. The outcropping you followed in from the surface never has been in place, ma’am. It’s what I’d call a wild stringer. It pinched out forty foot back of where we’re diggin’ now. That’s just an iron stain we’re following, and the pocket of high grade don’t mean nothin’. You went in on the strength of indications—” He stopped there and chuckled to himself, in a way that I’d come to know as the “indications” of a story,—which usually followed.
The Little Woman probably guessed. I suppose she was lonely, too, and the pain of her hurts made her want entertainment. “What are you laughing at, Casey Ryan?” she demanded. “If it’s funny, tell me.”
Casey blushed, though she couldn’t have seen him in the dusky light of the cabin. “Aw, it ain’t anything much,” he protested bashfully. “I just happened to think about a little ol’ Frenchman I knowed once, over in Cripple Creek, ma’am.” He stopped.
“Well? Tell me about the little ol’ Frenchman. It made you laugh, Casey Ryan, and it’s about the first time I’ve seen you do that. Tell me.”
“Well, it ain’t nothin’ very funny to tell about,” Casey hedged like a bashful boy; which was mighty queer for Casey Ryan, I assure you. For if there was anything Casey liked better than a funny story, it was some one to listen while he told it. “You won’t git the kick, mebby. It’s knowin’ the Frenchman makes it seem kinda funny when I think about it. He was a good little man and he kept a little hotel and was an awful good cook. And he wanted a gold mine worse than anybody I ever seen. He didn’t know a da—nothin’ at all about minin’ ma’am, but every ol’ soak of a prospector could git a meal off him by tellin’ him about some wildcat bonanza or other. He’d forgit to charge ’em, he’d be so busy listenin’.
“Well, there was two ol’ soaks that got around him to grubstake ’em. They worked it all one year. They’d git a burro load of grub and go out somewheres and peck around till it was all et up, and then they’d come back an’ tell Frenchy some wild tale about runnin’ acrost what looked like the richest prospect in the country. They’d go on about havin’ all the indications of a big body uh rich ore. He’d soak it in, an’ they’d hang around town—one had a sore foot one time, I remember, that lasted ’em a month of good board at Frenchy’s hotel before he drove ’em out agin to his mine, as he called it.
“They worked that scheme on him for a long time—and it was the only da— scheme they wasn’t too lazy to work. They’d git money to buy powder an’ fuse an’ caps, ma’am, an’ blow it on booze, y’see. An’ they’d hang in town, boardin’ off Frenchy, jest as long as they c’ld think of an excuse fer stayin’.
“So somebody tipped Frenchy off that he was bein’ worked for grub an’ booze money, an’ Frenchy done a lot uh thinkin’. Next time them two come in, he was mighty nice to ’em. An’ when he finally got ’em pried loose an’ headed out, he appeared suddenly and says he’s goin along to take a look at his mine. They couldn’t do nothin’ but take him, uh course. So they led him out to an old location hole somebody else had dug, an’ they showed him iron cappin’ an’ granite contact an’ so on—just talkin’ wild, an’ every few minutes comin’ in with the ‘strong indications of a rich ore body.’ That was their trump suit, y’see, ma’am.
“Frenchy listened, an’ his eyes commenced to snap, but he never said nothin’ for awhile. Then all at once he pulled one uh these ol’-style revolvers an’ points it at ’em, an’ yells: ‘Indicaziones! Indicaziones! T’ell weez your indicaziones! Now you show me zee me-tall!’” Casey stopped, reached for his plug and remembered that he mustn’t. The Little Woman laughed. She didn’t seem to need the tapering off of the story, as most women demand.
“And so you think I have plenty of indicaziones, but mighty little chance of getting the me-tall,” she pointed the moral. “Well, then tell me what to do.”
It was in the telling, I think, that Casey for the first time forgot to be shy and became his real, Casey Ryan best. The Little Woman saw at once, when he pointed it out to her, that she ought to drift and cut under the iron capping instead of tunnelling away from it as they had been doing.
But she was not altogether engrossed in that tunnel. I think her prospecting into the soul of Casey Ryan interested her much more; and being a woman she followed the small outcropping of his Irish humor and opened up a distinct vein of it before the evening was over. Just to convince you, she led him on until Casey told her all about feeding his Ford syrup instead of oil, and all about how it ran over him a few times on the dry lake,—Casey was secretly made happy because she saw at once how easily that could happen, and never once doubted that he was sober! He told her about the goats in Patmos and made her laugh so hard that Babe woke and whimpered a little, and insisted that Casey take her up and rock her again in the old homemade chair with crooked juniper branches hewn for rockers.
With Babe in his arms he told her, too, about his coming out to hunt the Injun Jim mine. He must have felt
pretty well acquainted, by then, because he regaled her with a painstaking, Caseyish description of Lucy Lily and her educated wardrobe, and—because she was a murderous kind of squaw and entitled to no particular chivalry—even repeated her manner of proposing to a white man, and her avowed reason and all. That was going pretty far, I think, for one evening, but we must keep in mind the fact that Casey and the Little Woman had met almost a month before this, and that Casey had merely thrown wide open the little door to his real self.
At any rate it was after ten o’clock by Casey’s Ingersoll when he tucked Babe into her little bed, brought a jelly glass of cold water for the Little Woman to drink in the night, and started for the door.
There he stopped for a minute, debated with his shyness and turned back.
“You mebby moved that steel at the wrong time,” he said abruptly, “I guess you musta, the way it happened. But I was so scared I’d hit yuh, my teeth was playin’ the dance to La Paloma. I was in a cold sweat. I never did hit a man with a double-jack in my life, and I guess I’ve put down ten miles uh holes, ma’am, if you placed ’em end to end. I always made it my brag I never scraped a knuckle at that game. But—them little hands of yours on the drill—I was shakin’ all over for fear I might—hurt yuh. I— I never hated anything so bad in my life—I’d ruther kill a dozen men than hurt you—”
“Man alive,” the Little Woman exclaimed softly from her dusky corner, “you’d never have hurt me in the world, if I’d had the nerve to trust you.” And she added softly, “I’ll trust you, from now on, Casey Ryan. Always.”
I think Casey was an awful fool to walk out and never let her know that he heard that “Always.”
CHAPTER XXI
“Casey Ryan,” the Little Woman began with her usual abruptness one evening, when she was able to walk as far as the mine and back without feeling; the effect of the exercise, but was still nursing a bandaged right hand; “Casey Ryan, tell me again just what old Injun Jim looked like.”
Casey laughed and shifted Babe to a more secure perch on his shoulder, and drew his head to one side in an effort to slacken Babe’s terrific pull on his hair. “Him? Mean an’ ornery as the meanest thing you can think of. Sour as a dough can you’ve went off an’ left for a coupla weeks in July.”
“Oh, yes; very explicit, I admit. But just what did he look like? Height, weight, age and chief characteristics. I have,” she explained, “a very-good reason for wanting a description of him.”
“What yuh want a description of him for? He’s good an’ dead now.” You see, Casey had reached the point of intimacy where he could argue with the Little Woman quite in his everyday Irish spirit of contention.
The Little Woman had spirit of her own, but she was surprisingly meek with Casey at times. “It struck me quite suddenly, today, that I may know where that gold mine is; or about where it is,” she said, with a hidden excitement in her voice. “I’ve been thinking all day about it, and putting two and two together. I merely need a fair description now of Injun Jim, to feel tolerably certain that I do or do not know something about the location of that mine.”
“How’d you come to know anything about it?” Casey stopped to move Babe to his other shoulder. He had put in a long hard day in the tunnel, and Babe was a husky youngster for four-and-a-half. Also she had developed a burr-like quality toward Casey, and she liked so well to be carried home from the mine that she would sit flat on the ground and rock her small body and weep until she was picked, up and placed on Casey’s shoulder. “Set still, now, Babe, or Casey’ll have to put yuh down an’ make yuh walk home. Le’go my ear! Yuh want Casey to go around lop-sided, with only one ear?”
“Yes!” assented Babe eagerly, kicking Casey in the stomach. “Give me your knife, Casey Wyan, so I can cut off one ear an’ make you lop-sided!”
“An’ you’d do it, too!” Casey exclaimed admiringly.
“Baby Girl, you interrupted mother when mother was speaking of something important. You make mother very sad.”
Babe’s mouth puckered, her eyelids puckered, and she give a small wail. “Now Baby’s sad! You hurt—my—feelin’s when you speak to me cross!” She shook her yellow curls into her eyes and wept against them.
There was no hope of grown-ups talking about anything so foolish as a gold mine when Babe was in that mood. So Casey cooked supper, washed the dishes and helped Babe into her pyjamas; then he let her kneel restively in his lap while she said her prayers, and told her a story while he rocked her to sleep—it was a funny, Caseyish story about a bear, but we haven’t time for it now—before he attempted to ask the Little Woman again what she meant by her mysterious curiosity concerning Injun Jim. Then, when he had his pipe going and the stove filled with piñon wood, he turned to her with the question in his eyes.
The Little Woman laughed. “Now, if that terrible child will kindly consent to sleep for fifteen minutes, I’ll tell you what I meant,” she said. “It had slipped my mind altogether, and it was only today, when Babe was scratching out a snake’s track—so the snake couldn’t find the way back home, she said—that I chanced to remember. Just a small thing, you know, that may or may not mean something very large and important—like a gold mine, for instance.”
“I don’t have to go to work ’til sunup,” Casey hinted broadly, “and I’ve set up many a night when I wasn’t havin’ half as much fun as I git listenin’ to you talk.”
Again the Little Woman laughed. I think she had been rambling along just to bait Casey into something like that.”
“Very well, then, I’ll come to the point. Though it is such a luxury to talk, sometimes! For a woman, that is.
“Three years ago we had two burros to pack water from your gulch, where there were too many snakes, to this gulch where there never seemed to be so many. We hadn’t developed this spring then. One night something or other frightened the burros and they disappeared, and I started out to find them, leaving Babe of course with her father at the tunnel.
“I trailed those burros along the mountain for about four miles, I should think. And by that time I was wishing I had taken a canteen with me, though when I started out from camp I hated the thought of being burdened with the weight of it. I thought I could find water in some of the gulches, however, so I climbed a certain ridge and sat down to rest and examine the canyon beneath with that old telescope Babe plays with. It has been dropped so many times it’s worthless now, but three years ago you could see a lizard run across a rock a mile away. Don’t you believe that?” she stopped to demand sternly.
“Say! You couldn’t tell me nothin’ I wouldn’t believe!” Casey retorted, fussing with his pipe to hide the grin on his face.
“This is the truth, as it happens. I merely speak of the lizard to convince you that a man’s features would show very distinctly in the telescope. And please observe, Casey Ryan, that I am very serious at the moment. This may be important to you, remember.
“I was sitting among a heap of boulders that capped the ridge, and it happened that I was pretty well concealed from view because I was keeping in the shade of a huge rock and had crouched down so that I could steady the telescope across a flat rock in front of me. So I was not discovered by a man down in the canyon whom I picked up with the telescope while I was searching the canyon side for a spring.
“The man was suddenly revealed to me as he parted the branches of a large greasewood and peered out. I think it was the stealthiness of his manner that impressed me most. He looked up and down and across, but he did not see me. After a short wait, while he seemed to be listening, he crept out from behind the bush, turned and lifted forward a bag which hadn’t much in it, yet appeared quite heavy. He went down into the canyon, picking his way carefully and stepping on rocks, mostly. But in one place where he must cross a wash of deep sand, he went backward and with a dead branch he had picked up among the rocks he scratched out each track as he made it. Babe reminded me of that today when she scratched out the snake’s track in the sand up by the mine.”
/>
Casey was leaning toward her, listening avidly, his pipe going cold in his hand. “Was he—?”
“He was an Indian, and very old, and he walked with that bent, tottery walk of old age. He had one eye and—”
“Injun Jim, that was—couldn’t be anybody else!” Casey knocked his pipe against the front of the little cookstove, emptying the half-burned tobacco into the hearth. The Little Woman probably wondered why he seemed so unexcited, but she did not know all of Casey’s traits. He put away his pipe and almost immediately reached for his plug of tobacco, taking a chew without remembering where he was. “If you feel able to ride,” he said, “I’ll ketch up the mule in the morning, and we’ll go over there.”
“So your heart is really set on finding it, after all. I’ve been wondering about that. You haven’t seemed to be thinking much about it, lately.”
“A feller can prospect,” Casey declared, “when he can’t do nothin’ else.” And he added rather convincingly, “Good jobs is scarce, out this way. I’d be a fool to pass up this one, when I’d have the hull winter left fer prospectin’.”
“And what about those partners of yours?”
“Oh, them?” Casey hesitated, tempted perhaps to tell the truth. “Oh, they’ve quit on me. They quit right away after I went to work. We—we had a kinda fuss, and they’ve went back to town.” He stopped and added with a sigh of relief, “We can just as well count them out, fr’m now on—an’ fergit about ’em.”
“Oh,” said the Little Woman, and smiled to herself. “Well, if you are anxious about that patch of brush in the canyon, we’ll go and see what’s behind it. Tomorrow is Sunday, anyway.”
“I’d a made up the time, if it wasn’t,” Casey assured her with dignity. “I’ve been waitin’ a good many years for a look at that Injun Jim gold.”
“And it’s just possible that I have been almost within reach of it for the past four years and didn’t know it! Well, I always have believed that Fate weaves our destinies for us; and a curious pattern is the weaving, sometimes! I’ll go with you, Casey Ryan, and I hope, for your sake, that Indian Jim’s mine is behind that clump of bushes. And I hope,” she added, with a little laugh whose meaning was not clear to Casey, “I hope you get a million dollars out of it! I should like to point to Casey Ryan, the mining millionaire and say, ‘That plutocratic gentleman over there once knocked me down with a hammer, and washed my dishes for two weeks, and really, my dears, you should taste his sour-dough biscuits!’”