The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  Casey went away to his camp and lay awake a long time, not thinking about the Injun Jim mine, if you please, but wondering what he had done to make the Little Woman give him hell about his biscuits. Good Lord! Did she still blame him for hitting her with that double-jack?—when he knew and she knew that she had made him do it!—and if she didn’t like his sour-dough biscuits, why in thunder had she kept telling him she did?

  He tucked the incident away in the back of his mind, meaning to watch her and find out just what she did mean, anyway. Her opinion of him had become vital to Casey; more vital than the Injun Jim mine, even.

  He saddled the buckskin mule next morning and after breakfast the three set out, with a lunch and two canteens of water. The Little Woman was in a very good humor and kept Casey “jumpin’ sideways,” as he afterwards confessed to me, wondering just what she meant or whether she meant nothing at all by her remarks concerning his future wealth and dignity and how he would forget old friends.

  She even pretended she had forgotten the place, and was not at all sure that this was the right canyon, when they came to it. She studied landmarks and then said they were all wrong and that the place was marked in her mind by something entirely different and not what she first named. She deviled Casey all she could, and led him straight to the spot and suggested that they eat their lunch there, within twenty feet of the bushes from which she had seen the Indian creep with the sack on his back.

  She underrated Casey’s knowledge of minerals; or perhaps she wanted to test it,—you never can tell what a woman really has in the back of her mind. Casey sat there eating a sour-dough biscuit of his own making, and staring at the steep wall of the canyon because he was afraid to stare at the Little Woman, and so his uncannily keen eye saw a bit of rock no larger than Babe’s fist. It lay just under that particular clump of bushes, in the shade. And in the shade he saw a yellow gleam on the rock.

  He looked at the Little Woman then and grinned, but he didn’t say anything until he had taken the coffeepot off the fire, and had filled her cup.

  “This ain’t a bad canyon to prospect in. You can brush up your memory whilst I take a look around. Mebby I can find Jim’s mine myself,” he said impudently. Then he got up and went poking here and there with his prospector’s pick, and finally worked up to the brush and disappeared behind it. In five minutes or less he came back to her with a little nugget the size of Babe’s thumb.

  “If yuh want to see something pretty, come on up where I got this here,” he told her. “I’ll show yuh what drives prospectors crazy. This ain’t no free gold country, but there’s a pile uh gold in a dirt bank I can show yuh. Mebby you forgot the place, and mebby yuh didn’t. I’ve quit guessin’ at what yuh really do mean an’ what yuh don’t mean. Anyway, this is where we headed for.”

  “Well, you really are a prospector, after all. I just wondered.” The Little Woman did not seem in the least embarrassed. She just laughed and took Babe by the hand, and they went up beyond the clump of bushes to what lay hidden so cunningly behind it.

  Cunning—that was the mood Nature must have been in when she planted free gold in that little wrinkle on the side of Two Peak, and set the bushes in the mouth of the draw, and piled an iron ledge across the top and spread barren mountainside all around it. In the hiding Injun Jim had done his share, too. He had pulled rubble down over the face of the bank of richness, and eyes less keen than Casey’s would have passed it by without a second glance.

  The Little Woman knelt and picked out half a dozen small nuggets and stood up, holding them out to Casey, her eyes shining. “Casey Ryan, here’s the end of your rainbow! And you’re luckier than most of us; you’ve got your pot o’ gold.”

  Casey looked down at her oddly. “It’s mebby the end of one,” he said. “But they’s another one, now, ’t I can see plainer than this one. I dunno’s I’ll ever git to where that one points.”

  “A man’s never satisfied,” scoffed the Little Woman, turning the precious little yellow fragments over thoughtfully in her palm. “I should think this ought to be enough for you, man alive.”

  “Mebby it had. But it ain’t.” He looked at her, hesitating,—and I think the Little Woman waited and held her breath for what he might say next. But Casey was scarcely himself in her presence. He turned away without another glance at the nuggets.

  “You’n the kid can gopher around there whilst I go step off the lines of a claim an’ put up the location notice,” he said, and left her standing there with the gold in her palm.

  That night it was the Little Woman who planned great things for Casey, and it was Casey who smoked and said little about it. But once he shook his head when she described the gilded future she saw for him.

  “Money in great gobs like that ain’t much use to me,” he demurred. “Once I blew into Lund, over here, with twenty-five thousand dollars in my pocket that I got outa silver claims. All I ever saved outa that chunk was two pairs of socks. No need of you makin’ plans on my being a millionaire. It ain’t in me. I guess I’m nothin’ but a rough-neck stagedriver an’ prospector, clear into the middle of my bones. If I had the sense of a rabbit I never’d gone hellin’ through life the way I’ve done. I’d amount to somethin’ by now. As it is I ain’t nothin’ and I ain’t nobody—”

  “You’re Casey Wyan! You make me sad when you say that!” Babe protested sleepily, lifting her head from his shoulder and spatting him reprovingly on the cheek. “You’re my bes’ friend and you’ve got a lots more sense than a wabbit!”

  “And your rainbow, Casey Ryan?” the Little Woman asked softly. “What about this other, new rainbow?”

  “It’s there,” said Casey gloomily. “It’ll always be there—jest over the ridge ahead uh me. I c’n see it, plain enough, but I got more sense ’n to think I’ll ever git m’hands on it.”

  “I’ll go catch your wainbow, Casey Wyan. I’ll run fas’ as I can, an’ I’ll catch it for you!”

  “Will yuh, Babe?” Casey bent his head until his lips touched her curls. And neither Casey nor the Little Woman spoke of it again.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Oddly enough, it was Lucy Lily who unconsciously brought Casey to his rainbow. Lucy Lily did not mean to do Casey any favor, I can assure you, but Fate just took her and used her for the moment, and Lucy Lily had nothing to say about it.

  Don’t think that a squaw who wants to live like a white princess will forget to go hunting a gold mine whose richness she had seen,—in a lard bucket, perhaps. Lucy Lily did not abandon her bait. She used it again, and a renegade white man snapped at it, worse luck. So they went hunting through the Tippipahs for the mine of Injun Jim. What excuses the squaw made for not being able to lead the man directly to the spot, I can’t say, of course; but I suppose she invented plenty.

  She did one clever thing, at least. In their wanderings she led the way into the old camp of Injun Jim. There had been no storm to dim the tracks Casey had made, and Lucy Lily, Indian that she was, knew that these were the tracks of Casey Ryan and guessed what was his errand there. So she and her white man trailed him across the valley to Two Peak.

  They came first to the camp, and there the Little Woman met them, and by some canny intuition knew who they were and what they wanted,—thanks to Casey’s garrulous mood when he told her of Lucy Lily. They said that they were hunting horses, and presently went on over the ridge; not following Casey’s plain trail to the tunnel, but riding off at an angle so that they could come into the trail once they were hidden from the house.

  Casey, as it happened, was not at the tunnel at all, but over at the gold mine, doing the location work. Doing it in the side hill a good two hundred feet away from the gold streak, too, I will add.

  The Little Woman watched until the squaw and her man were out of sight, and then she took a small canteen and filled it, got her rifle, pocketed her automatic revolver, and tied Babe’s sunbonnet firmly under Babe’s double chin. She could not take the mule, because Casey had ridden him, so she walked, and carr
ied Babe most of the way on her back. She kept to the gulches until she was too far away to be seen in the sage, even when a squaw was squinting sharp-eyed after her.

  She came, in the course of two hours or so, to the lip of the canyon, and who-whooed to Casey, mucking out after a shot he had put down in the location hole. Casey looked up, waved his hand and then came running. No whim would send the Little Woman on a four-mile walk with a heavy child like Babe to carry, and Casey was as white as he’ll ever get when he met her halfway to the bottom of the canyon.

  “Take Babe and let’s get back to the claim,” she panted. “I came to tell you that squaw is on your trail with a white man in tow, and it’ll be a case of claim-jumping if they can see their way tolerably clear. He’s a mate for the two you helped me haul out of camp, and I think, Casey Ryan, the squaw would kill you in a minute if she gets the chance.”

  Casey did rather a funny thing, considering how scared he was usually of the Little Woman. “You pack that kid all the way over here?” he grunted, and picked up the Little Woman and carried her, and left Babe to walk. Of course he helped Babe, holding her hand over the roughest spots, but it was the Little Woman whom he carried the rest of the way. And Babe, if you please, was quite calm about it and never once became “sad” so that she must sit down and cry.

  “All the claim-jumpin’ they’ll do won’t hurt nobody,” Casey observed unexcitedly, when he had set the Little Woman down on a rock beside his location “cut” in the canyon’s side. “She likely picked on a white man so’s he could locate under the law, but this claim’s located a’ready.” He waved a hand toward the monument, a few rods up the canyon. “And Casey Ryan ain’t spreadin’ no rich gold vein wide open for every prowlin’ desert rat to pack off all he kin stagger under. I’m callin’ it the Devil’s Lantern. You c’n call a mine any name yuh darn want to. And if it wasn’t fer the Devil’s Lantern, I wouldn’t be here. That name won’t mean nothin’ to ’em. Let ’em come.” His eyes turned toward the hidden richness and dwelt there, studying the tracks, big and little, that led up to it, and deciding that tracks do not necessarily mean a gold mine, and that it would be better to leave them as they were and not attempt to cover them.

  “You just say it’s your claim, if they come snoopin’ around here. I’m supposed to be workin’ for yuh,” he said abruptly, giving her one of his quick, steady glances.

  “They can go and read the location notice,” the Little Woman pointed out. Casey did not make any reply to that, but picked up his shovel and went to work again, mucking out the dirt and broken rocks which the dynamite had loosened in the cut.

  “She’s a bird, ain’t she?” he grinned over his shoulder, his mind reverting to Lucy Lily. “Did she have on her war paint?”

  “She will have, when she sees you,” the Little Woman retorted, watching the farther rim of the canyon. Then she remembered Babe and called to her. That youngster was always prospecting around on her own initiative, and she answered shrilly now from up the canyon. The Little Woman stood up, looking that way, never dreaming how wishfully Casey was watching her,— and how reverently.

  “Baby Girl, you must not run off like that! Mother will be compelled to tie a rope on you.”

  “I was jes’ getting—Casey Wyan’s—’bacco. Poor Casey Wyan forgot—his ’bacco! He’s my frien’. I have to give him his ’bacco,” Babe defended herself, coming down from the location monument in small jumps and scrambles. Close to her importantly heaving chest she clutched a small, red tobacco can of the kind which smokers carelessly call “P.A.” “Casey Wyan lost it up in the wocks,” Babe explained, when her mother met her disapprovingly and caught her by the hand.

  “Why, Babe! You’ve been naughty. This must be Casey Ryan’s location notice. It must be left in the rocks, Baby Girl, so people will know that Casey Ryan owns this claim.”

  “It’s his ’bacco!” Babe insisted stubbornly. “Casey Wyan needs his ’bacco.”

  The Little Woman knew that streak of stubbornness of old. There was just one way to deal with it, and that was to prove to Babe that she was mistaken. So she opened the red can and pulled out a folded paper, unfolded the paper and began to read it aloud. Not that Babe would understand it all, but to make it seem very convincing and important,—and I think partly to enjoy for herself the sense of Casey’s potential wealth.

  “‘Notice of Location—Quartz,’” she read, and glanced over the paper at her listening small daughter. “‘To Whom it May Concern: Please take notice that: The name of this claim is the Devil’s Lantern Quartz Mining Claim. Said Claim is situated in the—Unsurveyed—Mining District, County of Nye, State of Nevada. Located this twenty-fifth day of September, 19—. This discovery is made and this notice is posted this twenty-fifth day of September,19—.

  “‘2. That the undersigned locators are citizens of he United States or have declared their intention to become such, and have discovered mineral-bearing rock—!’”

  “What’s mineral-bearing wock, mother?”

  “That’s the gold, Baby Girl. ‘—in place thereon and do locate and claim same for mining purposes.

  “‘3. That the number of linear feet in length along the course of the vein each way from the point of discovery whereon we have erected a monument—’ That’s the monument, up there, and Babe must not touch it— ‘—is Easterly 950 feet; Westerly 550 feet; that the total length does not exceed 1500 feet. That the width on the Southerly side is 300 feet; that the width on the Northerly side is 300 feet; that the end lines are parallel; that the general course of the vein or lode as near as may be is in an Easterly and Westerly direction; that the boundaries of this claim may be readily traced and are defined as follows, to-wit:—!’”

  She skipped a lot of easterly and westerly technique in Casey’s clear, uncompromising handwriting—done in an indelible pencil—and came down to the last paragraph:

  “‘That all the dips, variations, spurs, angles and all veins, ledges, or deposits within the lines of said claim, together with all water and timber and any other rights appurtenant, allowed by the law of this State or of the United States are hereby claimed.

  “‘Locators Jack I. Gleason, Margaret Sutten.’

  “Why—why-y—Good Lord!”

  “Here they come,” Casey called at that moment. “Put ’er back in the monument and don’t let on like we think they’re after this claim at all. It’s a darn sight harder to start a fuss when the other fellow don’t act like he knows there’s any fuss comin’. You ask anybody that ever had a fight.”

  COW-COUNTRY (Part 1)

  CHAPTER ONE

  AN AMBITIOUS MAN-CHILD WAS BUDDY

  In hot mid afternoon when the acrid, gray dust cloud kicked up by the listless plodding of eight thousand cloven hoofs formed the only blot on the hard blue above the Staked Plains, an ox stumbled and fell awkwardly under his yoke, and refused to scramble up when his negro driver shouted and prodded him with the end of a willow gad.

  “Call your master, Ezra,” directed a quiet woman voice gone weary and toneless with the heat and two restless children. “Don’t beat the poor brute. He can’t go any farther and carry the yoke, much less pull the wagon.”

  Ezra dropped the gad and stepped upon the wagon tongue where he might squint into the dust cloud and decide which gray, plodding horseman alongside the herd was Robert Birnie. Far across the sluggish river of grimy backs, a horse threw up its head with a peculiar sidelong motion, and Ezra’s eyes lightened with recognition. That was the colt, Rattler, chafing against the slow pace he must keep. Hands cupped around big, chocolate-colored lips and big, yellow-white teeth, Ezra whoo-ee-ed the signal that called the nearest riders to the wagon that held the boss’s family.

  Bob Birnie and another man turned and came trotting back, and at the call a scrambling youngster peered over his mother’s shoulder in the forward opening of the prairie schooner.

  “O-oh, Dulcie! We gonna git a wile cow agin!”

  Dulcie was asleep and did not ans
wer, and the woman in the slat sun-bonnet pushed back with her elbow the eager, squirming body of her eldest. “Stay in the wagon, Buddy. Mustn’t get down amongst the oxen. One might kick you. Lie down and take a nap with sister. When you waken it will be nice and cool again.”

  “Not s’eepy!” objected Buddy for the twentieth time in the past two hours. But he crawled back, and his mother, relieved of his restless presence, leaned forward to watch the approach of her husband and the cowboy. This was the second time in the past two days that an ox had fallen exhausted, and her eyes showed a trace of anxiety. With the feed so poor and the water so scarce, it seemed as though the heavy wagon, loaded with a few household idols too dear to leave behind, a camp outfit and the necessary clothing and bedding for a woman and two children, was going to be a real handicap on the drive.

  “Robert, if we had another wagon, I could drive it and make the load less for these four oxen,” she suggested when her husband came up. “A lighter wagon, perhaps with one team of strong horses, or even with a yoke of oxen, I could drive well enough, and relieve these poor brutes.” She pushed back her sun-bonnet and with it a mass of red-brown hair that curled damply on her forehead, and smiled disarmingly. “Buddy would be the happiest baby boy alive if I could let him drive now and then!” she added humorously.

  “Can’t make a wagon and an extra yoke of oxen out of this cactus patch,” Bob Birnie grinned good humoredly. “Not even to tickle Buddy. I’ll see what I can do when we reach Olathe. But you won’t have to take a man’s place and drive, Lassie.” He took the cup of water she drew from a keg and proffered-water was precious on the Staked Plains, that season-and his eyes dwelt on her fondly while he drank. Then, giving her hand a squeeze when he returned the cup, he rode back to scan the herd for an animal big enough and well-conditioned enough to supplant the worn-out ox.