CHAPTER VI
Stanley Mitchell topped the last rise in Morning Gate Pass in the late afternoon. Cobre Basin spread deep and wide before him, ruddy in the low sun; Cobre town and mines, on his left, loomed dim and misshapen in the long dark shadows of the hills.
Awguan, top horse and foreman of Stanley's mount, swung pitapat down the winding pass at a brisk fox trot. The gallop, as a road gait, is frowned upon in the cow countries as immature and wasteful of equine energy.
He passed Loder's Folly, high above the trail—gray, windowless, and forlorn; the trail dipped into the cool shadows, twisted through the mazy deeps of Wait-a-Bit Cañon, clambered zigzag back to the sunlit slope, and curved round the hillsides to join, in long levels, the wood roads on the northern slopes.
As he turned into the level, Stanley's musings were broken in upon by a sudden prodigious clatter. Looking up, he became aware of a terror, rolling portentous down the flinty ridge upon him; a whirlwind streak of billowed dust, shod with sparks, tipped by a hurtling color yet unknown to man; and from the whirlwind issued grievous words.
Awguan leaped forward.
Bounding over boulders or from them, flashing through catclaw and ocatillo, the appearance swooped and fell, the blend disjoined and shaped to semblance of a very small red pony bearing a very small blue boy. The pony's small red head was quite innocent of bridle; the bit was against his red breast, held there by small hands desperate on the reins; the torn headstall flapped rakishly about the red legs. Making the curve at sickening speed, balanced over everlasting nothingness for a moment of breathless equipoise, they took the trail.
Awguan thundered after. Stanley bent over, pelted by flying pebbles and fragments of idle words.
Small chance to overhaul the prodigy on that ribbed and splintered hill; Awguan held the sidelong trail at the red pony's heels. They dipped to cross an arroyo; Stan lifted his head and shouted:
"Fall off in the sand!"
"Damnfido!" wailed the blue boy.
Sand flashed in rainbow arches against Awguan's brown face—he shut his eyes against it; they turned up the hill beyond. A little space ahead showed free of bush or boulder. Awguan took the hillside below the trail, lowered his head, laid his ears back, and bunched his mighty muscles. He drew alongside; leaning far over, heel to cantle, Stan threw his arm about the small red neck, and dragged the red pony to a choking stand. The small blue boy slipped to earth, twisted the soft bridle rein once and again to a miraculous double half-hitch about the red pony's jaw, and tightened it with a jerk.
"I've got him!" shrieked the blue boy.
The red pony turned mild bright eyes upon brown Awguan, and twitched red velvet ears to express surprise, and wrinkled a polite nose.
"Hello! I hadn't noticed you before. Fine day, isn't it?" said the ears.
Awguan rolled his wicked eye and snorted. The blue boy shrilled a comment of surprising particulars—a hatless boy in denim. Stanley turned his head at a clatter of hoofs; Something Dewing, on the trail from town, galloped to join them.
"That was a creditable arrest you made, Mitchell," he said, drawing rein.
"I saw it all from the top of Mule Hill. And I certainly thought our
Little Boy Blue was going to take the Big Trip. He'll make a hand!"
The gambler's eyes, unguarded and sincere for once, flashed quizzical admiration at Little Boy Blue, who, concurrently with the above speech, quavered forth his lurid personal opinions of the red pony. He was a lean, large-eyed person, apparently of some nine or ten years—which left his vocabulary unaccounted for; his face was smeared and bleeding, scratched by catclaw; his apparel much betattered by the same reason.
He now checked a flood of biographical detail concerning the red pony long enough to fling a remark their way:
"Ain't no Boy Blue—damn your soul! Name's Robteeleecarr!"
Dewing and Mitchell exchanged glances.
"What's that? What did he say?"
"He means to inform you," said Dewing, "that his name is Robert E. Lee Carr." His glance swept appraisingly up the farther hill, and he chuckled: "Old Israel Putnam would be green with envy if he had seen that ride. Some boy!"
"He must be a new one to Cobre; I've never seen him before."
"Been here a week or ten days, and he's a notorious character already. So is Nan-ná."
"Nan-ná, I gather, being the pony?"
"Exactly. Little Apache devil, that horse is. Robert's dad, one Jackson Carr, is going to try freighting. He's camped over the ridge at Hospital Springs, letting his horses feed up and get some meat on their bones. Here! Robert E. Lee, drop that club or I'll put the dingbats on you instanter! Don't you pound that pony! I saw you yesterday racing the streets with the throat-latch of your bridle unbuckled. Serves you right!"
Robert E. Lee reluctantly abandoned the sotol stalk he had been breaking to a length suitable for admonitory purposes.
"All right! But I'll fix him yet—see if I don't! He's got to pack me back up that hill after my hat. Gimme a knife, so's I can cut a saddle string and mend this bridle." These remarks are expurgated.
He mended the bridle; he loosened the cinches and set the saddle back.
Stan, dismounting, made a discovery.
"I've lost a spur. Thought something felt funny. Noticed yesterday that the strap was loose." He straightened up from a contemplation of his boot heel; with a sudden thought, he searched the inner pocket of his coat. "And that isn't all. By George, I've lost my pocketbook, and a lot of money in it! But it can't be far; I've lost it somewhere on my boy chase. Come on, Dewing; help me hunt for it."
They left the boy at his mending and took the back track. Before they had gone a dozen yards Dewing saw the lost spur, far down the hill, lodged under a prickly pear. Stanley, searching intently for his pocketbook, did not see the spur. And Dewing said nothing; he lowered his eyelids to veil a sudden evil thought, and when he raised them again his eyes, which for a little had been clear of all save boyish mischief, were once more tense and hard.
Robert E. Lee Carr clattered gayly by them and pushed up the hill to recover his hat. The two men rode on slowly; a brown pocketbook upon a brown hillside is not easy to find. But they found it at last, just where Stanley had launched his pursuit of the hatless horseman. It had been jostled from his pocket in the first wild rush. Stanley retrieved it with a sigh of relief.
"Are you sure you had your spur here?" asked Dewing. "Maybe you lost it before and didn't notice it."
"Oh, never mind the spur," said Stan. "I'm satisfied to get my money.
Let's wait for Little Boy Blue and we'll all go in together."
"Want to try a little game to-night?" suggested Dewing. "I could use that money of yours. It seems a likely bunch—if it's all money. Pretty plump wallet, I call it."
"No more for me," laughed Stanley. "You behold in me a reformed character."
"Stick to that, boy," said Dewing. "Gambling is bad business."
It grew on to dusk when Robert E. Lee Carr rejoined them; it was pitch dark when they came to the Carr camp-fire at Hospital Springs, close beside the trail; when they reached Cobre, supper-time was over.
At the Mountain House Stanley ordered a special supper cooked for him, with real potatoes and cow milk. Dewing refused a drink, pleading his profession; and Stanley left his fat wallet in the Mountain House safe.
"Well, I'll say good-night now," said Dewing. "See you after supper?"
"Oh, I'll side you a ways yet. Goin' up to the shack to unsaddle. Always like to have my horse eat before I do. And you'll not see me after supper—not unless you are up at the post-office. I'm done with cards."
"I'd like to have a little chin with you to-morrow," said Dewing. "Not about cards. Business. I'm sick of cards, myself. I'll never be able to live 'em down—especially with this pleasing nickname of mine. I want to talk trade. About your ranch: you've still got your wells and water-holes? I was thinking of buying them of you and going in for the straight and narrow. I might even stock up and throw in with you—but you wouldn't want a partner from the wrong side of the table? Well, I don't blame you—but say, Stan, on the level, it's a funny old world, isn't it?"
"I'm going to take the stage to-morrow. See you when I come back. I'll sell. I'm reformed about cattle, too," said Stan.
At the ball ground he bade Dewing good-night. The latter rode on to his
own hostelry at the other end of town. Civilization patronized the
Admiral Dewey as nearest the railroad; mountain men favored the Mountain
House as being nearest to grass.
Stanley turned up a side street to the one-roomed adobe house on the edge of town that served as city headquarters for himself and Johnson. He unsaddled in the little corral; he brought a feed of corn for brown Awguan; he brought currycomb and brush and made glossy Awguan's sleek sides, turning him loose at last, with a friendly slap, to seek pasture on Cobre Hills. Then he returned to the Mountain House for the delayed supper.
Meantime Mr. Something Dewing held a hurried consultation with Mr. Mayer Zurich; and forthwith took horse again for Morning Gate Pass, slipping by dark streets from the town, turning aside to pass Hospital Springs. Where the arrest of the red pony had been effected, Dewing dismounted; below the trail, a dozen yards away, he fished Mr. Stanley Mitchell's spur from under a prickly pear; and returned in haste to Cobre.
After his supper Stanley strolled into Zurich's—The New York Store.
Unknown to him, at that hour brown Awguan was being driven back to his little home corral, resaddled—with Stanley's saddle—and led away into the dark.
Stanley exchanged greetings with the half-dozen customers who lingered at the counters, and demanded his mail. Zurich handed out two fat letters with the postmark of Abingdon, New York. While Stanley read them, Zurich called across the store to a purchaser of cigars and tobacco:
"Hello, Wiley! Thought you had gone to Silverbell so wild and fierce."
"Am a-going now," said Wiley, "soon as I throw a couple or three drinks under my belt."
"Say, Bat, do you think you'll make the morning train? It's going on nine now."
"Surest thing you know! That span of mine can stroll along mighty peart.
Once I get out on the flat, we'll burn the breeze."
"Come over here, then," said Zurich. "I want you to take some cash and send it down to the bank by express—about eight hundred; and some checks besides. I can't wait for the stage—it won't get there till to-morrow night. I've overdrawn my account, with my usual carelessness, and I want this money to get to the bank before the checks do."
Stanley went back to his little one-roomed house. He shaved, bathed, laid out his Sunday best, re-read his precious letters, and dropped off to dreamless sleep.
Between midnight and one o'clock Bat Wiley, wild-eyed and raging, burst into the barroom of the Admiral Dewey and startled with a tale of wrongs such part of wakeful Cobre as there made wassail. At the crossing of Largo Draw he had been held up at a gun's point by a single robber on horseback; Zurich's money had been taken from him, together with some seventy dollars of his own; his team had been turned loose; it had taken him nearly an hour to catch them again, so delaying the alarm by that much.
Boots and spurs; saddling of horses; Bob Holland, the deputy sheriff, was called from his bed; a swift posse galloped into the night, joined at the last moment by Mr. Dewing, who had retired early, but had been roused by the clamor.
They came to Largo Crossing at daybreak. The trail of the robber's horse led straight to Cobre, following bypaths through the mountains. The tracks showed plainly that his coming had been by these same short cuts, saving time while Bat Wiley had followed the tortuous stage road through the hills. Halfway back a heavy spur lay in the trail; some one recognized it as Stanley Mitchell's—a smith-wrought spur, painfully fashioned from a single piece of drill steel.
They came to Cobre before sunup; they found brown Awguan, dejected and sweat-streaked, standing in hip-shot weariness on the hill near his corral. In the corral Stanley's saddle lay in the sand, the blankets sweat-soaked.
Unwillingly enough, Holland woke Stan from a smiling sleep to arrest him. They searched the little room, finding the mate to the spur found on the trail, but nothing else to their purpose. But at last, bringing Stan's saddle in before locking the house, Bull Pepper noticed a bumpy appearance in the sheepskin lining, and found, between saddle skirt and saddle tree, the stolen money in full, and even the checks that Zurich had sent.
They haled Stan before the justice, who was also proprietor of the Mountain House. Waiving examination, Stanley Mitchell was held to meet the action of the Grand Jury; and in default of bond—his guilt being assured and manifest—he was committed to Tucson Jail.
The morning stage, something delayed on his account, bore him away under guard, en route, most clearly, for the penitentiary.