XXII—MONEY ON THE GALLOP
IN most circumstances, being padded with bills to the amount of six thousand dollars would be comfortably warming. But in my case the possession of that sum only provoked irritation.
I had set out to save Zebulon Kingsley’s name and the peace of mind of his family. The sum I had replevined by my scheme of justice fell far short of what we needed—and there was the promise I had given Dodovah Vose, as well.
From the hotel porch I saw my friend, the stage-driver, humping it toward me.
“I have tripped, tied, and gagged him. That was the only thing to do! He got here and he got two drinks into himself before I could slip the bridle on him. In another two minutes he would have been jumping clear off’n the ground, head and tail up, snorting out everything he knows. But I got to him—and I’ve laid him away, tied and gagged. Go to it, Mr. Mann, go to it, I tell you!”
He certainly was some excited!
“Are you talking about a man or a cayuse?” I asked. “I’m talking about ‘Dirty-shirt’—he’s just in from Blacksnake Gully ahead of the news. Say, they’ve struck a brown crumble in ‘Bright Eyes’ with gold set into the mush like raisins in a drunken cook’s pudding. You’re a sport and a friend of mine. I’m letting you in. Come along!”
He ran away a little distance and whirled and halted with the eager air of a dog who is inviting his master to follow. I’ll bet if he had had long ears he would have perked them; if he had had a tail he would have wagged it.
“You’re a sport—and I know it. Come along,” he called.
Along the street came loafing the individual who had tried to sell me “Bright Eyes” stock, and he heard that call.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, pard,” he advised the driver. “He’s no sport. I have tried him out. He won’t take a chance. I gave him a chance on some mining shares.”
“What shares?” asked the stage-driver.
“‘Bright Eyes’ in the Blacksnake.”
My friend was truly a good actor. He showed no interest.
“Shift the name to ‘blacked eyes.’ Yes, and both of ’em closed at that. No good!”
“I tell you there’s something in the air,” insisted the other. “It’s a fair gamble at twenty-five cents a share.” He pulled out some papers and walked up to me.
“You look like ready money, my friend. I’d rather play the wheel just now than be rich. I’m tied in here by the mud and it’s getting on to my nerves. Take ten thousand at twenty-five cents. I’ll close out to you.”
“Hold on!” sang out the driver, and he managed to smuggle a wink to me while he was tugging papers out of his pocket on his way back to join us. “If you’re in the market for ‘Bright Eyes,’ Eastern fellow, here’s ten thousand shares for fifteen cents a share.”.
“Don’t you come butting in on my market,” protested the prospector, elbowing the driver away. “I got to this gent first.”
“Those shares have been used all over this section for counters in poker games when beans got too expensive,” sneered the driver.
The prospector pulled out more papers.
“If you’ll take twenty thousand at ten cents a share I’ll pass ’em over. I was intending to hold on to ten thousand shares for a gamble. I tell you there’s something, somehow, somewhere, that says the hunch is out for ‘Bright Eyes.’ But I’ll let go for ten cents if you’ll take the bunch.”
“That’s no better offer than you made the other night,” I stated.
“I was pretty drunk, then, and I didn’t mean to make it. I’m daffy now, I reckon, or I wouldn’t be doing it over again.”
I stood there and looked them over and for the first time I gave a little real thought to that gold-mine proposition. Up to then the matter had been mere sound, shooting into one ear and out the other. I had been having plenty to think about in other lines.
It struck me that I was being played for a sucker by a couple of mighty awkward amateurs. Talk about Zebulon Kingsley buying a gold brick! That affair had been well buttered by some slick operators. What those two chaps were trying on me was truly raw work. That stage-driver—I didn’t even know his name—must have a healthy hate for me hidden deep down in him! I have cuffed a dog in my life and had him show more affection afterward, but I couldn’t believe that such treatment helped to mellow love in a human being. I knew it wouldn’t improve my own disposition any. In my thoughts I had some excuse for the two. They had probably been brought up to believe that the ordinary Easterner who had not already bought some punk gold-mine stock was thriftily saving up to buy some.
“There’s one of ’em born every minute,” I remarked to the stage-driver, “but I didn’t know I looked so much like one. Run away, the two of you, and fan yourselves with that stock; that’s the only way you’ll ever raise any wind with it.”
“You ain’t talking to me, are you—to me—Wash Flye?” inquired the driver.
“I am, if that’s your name—and it seems to fit you! But you are not fly enough!”
He opened eyes and mouth on me, stepped back a few feet, and visibly swelled.
“Well, my-y-y Ga-a-awd!” he wailed. “If that ain’t using the butt end of the whip on a willing friend, may I never sort webbin’s again!”
There was truly something sincere in his distress. But that sudden warming-up to me on the prairie after I had manhandled him, his unaccountable friendliness, his jacking his job for a few days in order to dog me about Breed City—the whole thing was too openly a plant.
“You’re a good actor. No wonder you’re in the stage business, Flye,” was my poor joke.
He looked at me for a full minute. Then he turned on the other man.
“It’s you, you horn-gilled wump, with your sashay prices and your drunken man’s gab—it’s you that has put me in wrong with a friend,” he squealed. “He thinks I’m like you are! He thinks I’m in mush with you on a brace! I’ll show him and you!” He leaped forward and began to kick the prospector with fury. The latter was a big and rather torpid person and he seemed to be in a sort of daze at first, and stood still while Mr. Flye kicked him. Then he turned and knocked Mr. Flye down; he picked him up and knocked him down again.
It struck me that if this were acting between friends it was getting too realistic. The driver’s face was bloody and he lay where he fell, his eyes closed.
I jumped between and pushed the prospector away. He struck at me and I was obliged to hit him a clip or two before he would hold off. We had a fairly good audience, but fisticuffs in Breed, when the muddy season made tempers short, seemed to stir only mild interest.
I found Mr. Flye on his knees and “weaving” weakly when I turned to him.
“I ain’t no fighter—I don’t pretend to be a fighter,” he mumbled. “I knew he was going to lick me if I kicked him. But that’s all right! There’s three teeth loose and my eyes are bunging! I can feel ’em! But it’s all right. If anybody thinks it was a scuffle between friends, he’d better take another think. I’ve took a licking to show some folks that there’s such a thing as being mistook in a man.”
I hadn’t straightened out my opinions, exactly, but I felt sudden pity and new respect for Mr. Flye, and some emotion even deeper. I helped him to his feet and took him into the wash-room of the hotel and fixed him up as best I could.
“I don’t blame you so very much,” he kept assuring me, whimpering through his bruised and bleeding lips. “It probably hasn’t seemed natural to you—it hasn’t seemed natural to me. This world is full of crooks and I s’pose you’ve been up against a lot of ’em. I done one crooked thing myself once when I kept water away from a drove of hogs for two days and then let ’em drink all they could hold just before I sold ’em live weight to a Snake River drover. But that drover had stolen two cayuses off’n my uncle! I didn’t know what I could do to show you, sir! Probably what I have done don’t show you. But I’ve done my best. It was all I could think of on short notice. I’ll let a dozen men beat me up if you will only understand that I ain’t going to do you or try to do you!”
That spirit of humble martyrdom was certainly getting to me!
“Look here, Mr Flye,” I blurted, “I don’t understand at all. Why in blazes are you taking all this interest in me?”
He gazed at me out of those pathetic, pale-blue eyes around which blue-black circles were settling. It was a lingering and wistful gaze.
“I don’t know, sir. It came over me all of a sudden. It ain’t often I take to anybody. It just came over me. You’re a real gent—you knowed just how to handle me. You know how to handle me now! Ain’t you doing the friendly act, hey?”
We were alone in the wash-room; the guests of the hotel flocked there only at meal-time.
“You can see how it looked to me—a stranger here—you two fellows chasing me up!”
“I don’t blame you, sir,” he agreed, meekly. “This world is full of crooks.”
“I have some money with me. It isn’t mine. I need more in a hurry—it’s to save a man’s name—save him from death, perhaps!” I couldn’t hold in. “It’s to save his daughter, too. I’m in love with her. I have been for years! It’s all I can think about. When you spoke of ‘Bright Eyes’ I felt—I felt—” I stopped and gulped.
“I reckon I know how you feel,” stated Mr. Flye, wagging that mussed-up head of his. “I know a girl. There’s hardly a minute when I ain’t thinking about her. She hasn’t paid no attention to me, but I’m going to her after I make my clean-up on ‘Bright Eyes’! It makes ’em think twice when there’s money. I ain’t much—”
“I’m desperate—I’m half crazy, Flye! This mine! Are you fooling me?”
He straightened and put his hand up like a man taking the oath. .
“I wanted you to get in because I liked you, sir. That’s why I was after you. But now that you say that you need money I’m begging and imploring you! If money will do what you say it will in your case, I say ’fore God you’ll commit a sin if you don’t grab in! I know it! It has come. ‘Dirty-shirt’ don’t know how to lie about it. The strike has been made. Take my word,” he pleaded.
“I’ll do it,” I told him. “I believe you’re trying to do an honest turn for me.” I put out my hand and he took it.
“Thank the Lord!” he said, and there was a lot of manliness about Mr. Wash Flye at that moment. “That licking was a good investment.” He said it devoutly.
“But will that fellow sell now?”
“Can you handle his twenty thousand shares at ten cents—two thousand dollars?”
“Yes.”
“When I offered at fifteen I was trying to beat him down to ten. Don’t give a cent more. Go show him the money and say you’re willing to be buncoed once in your life. And hurry—for the love of Sancho, hurry!”
I found the prospector watching a roulette game with the sour gaze of a busted gambler. He went into the corner with me when I jerked invitation with my chin.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he growled, when I mentioned the stock. “And I wouldn’t do business with you anyway, you—”
I unfolded four five-hundred-dollar bills. He stopped his declaration as suddenly as if I had pinched his throat.
“Money is money, I suppose,” said he, “though your shin-plasters from the East are poor things alongside the good hard coin.”
“There’s the bank across the street, and they’ll give you the good hard coin, mister.”
He pulled out his packet and I verified the amount of the certificates.
I went to the bank in his company, for he seemed to be bothered with the notion that those five-hundred-dollar bills needed me as introducer and sponsor. Then he hotfooted out, weighted with the coin. In spite of myself and of my fresh faith in Mr. Flye, my heart sank considerably when I saw that money take legs. The cashier was one of the amiable citizens I had met in the delegation from the Chamber of Commerce.
“Making a little investment?” he inquired, sociably.
“A foolish one, I am afraid. But an Easterner who hasn’t had a flier in a gold-mine at least once in his life gets to feeling lonesome after a time. That chap has been chasing me around with stock and a story and I have tossed a little spare change to him.”
The cashier peered through the wicket and beamed with new respect on a man who could speak of two thousand dollars as spare change.
“There are mines—and then there are mines,” he suggested.
I thought I might as well try my new tune over on this piano.
“It’s a proposition called ‘Two Bright Eyes.” I tried to seem indifferent, but my heart was only about an inch below my larynx and I could hardly get the words out.
I thought he would never speak. He scratched his nose and fiddled with his ear. I wanted to reach in and shake him so that he would say something, even if he would only say that I had been nicely fooled.
“The property had rather a promising outlook at one time, sir. It was located by good prospectors and afterward two or three other claims were taken in. The section is first-rate!”
Not wildly encouraging.
“But the stock hasn’t been much thought of in these parts—it has been footballed around a lot. Still”—he twisted his mustache and waited a few moments—“well, I’ll tell you this confidentially, if I wasn’t a bank man—and you know we have to move in grooves of caution—if I could afford to do a little gambling I think I would have picked up a small bunch of this loose stock. I got a flicker of a hint from a mining engineer who banks here. Nothing definite—they can’t talk much. But I know they have been running new leads. The first development wasn’t very scientific, I understand.”
“Does a—When they make a real strike—do prices run up pretty sudden?” I managed to ask.
He smiled. “I see you have never been in a mining town when a bonanza toots. Everybody goes crazy. They’ll climb over one another to buy stock. Those who can’t buy stock go racing off to see what they can grab in the way of adjacent claims. Very exciting, sir! Wish we might show you a circus of that kind while you’re in town.”
When I went out on the street I found Mr. Flye waiting around the corner.
“You traded?” he gasped. “He’s over there tossing away twenty-dollar gold pieces!”
“I’ve got twenty thousand shares,” I said, dolefully.
“Then I’m going to let ‘Dirty-shirt’ loose. He’ll swell up and bust if I don’t get that gag out of his mouth.”
“But will anybody believe what he says?”
Honestly, a gold-mine was unreal to me! I had Eastern prejudices.
“You go over there and stand on the hotel porch, sir! You’ll see almighty sudden how news hits a mining town. ‘Dirty-shirt’ Maddox don’t have to bring a gold-mine down into Breed City. He’s the bulletin, that’s all. There’ll be proof enough pretty close on his heels.”
So I went over on the tavern porch. Five minutes later I realized that the bulletin was loose. “It” came whooping around a corner of the street.
Mr. Maddox’s nickname fitted him perfectly; in fact, he was well caked with mud from head to feet. Plainly he had not stopped to pick dry spots in his rush down to Breed City. He was shaking a canvas bag over his head with one hand and in the other flourished a handful of stock certificates.
“Who’s got ‘Bright Eyes’? They’ve hit it! High grade from Buffalo Hump clear through the earth to Chiny! Whoosh! Who wants ‘Bright Eyes’? Here’s some that’s loose. And there ain’t much loose, gents! They have been picking it up! High grade and pockets full of crumble!”
He shook the canvas bag and opened it when men went crowding about him.
“There he is,” announced Mr. Flye at my side.
“Looks the part,” said I.
“After I had rubbed his jaws where the gag had hurt,” confided my friend, “he told me that he ain’t more’n four jumps ahead of the boss engineer expert who is bringing out the samples for the report. All you’ve got to do now, sir, is to sit tight and look wise!”
My unlucky friend could not do much looking for his part; his eyes were swelled so badly that he could hardly open them.
“Look here, Mr. Flye,” I said, with a lot of repentance, “I must seem to you like pretty much of a crab. I don’t know how—”
“It was only a gold-mine guess, according to your notion, sir. And I know how an Easterner must feel on that point. But when I have a friend and make up my mind to let him in on a good thing I propose to do it, even if I have to apologize to him afterward for being almighty fresh. So I—”
“Don’t make me feel worse than I am feeling!”
There was a crowd in the street of Breed City by that time and Mr. Maddox, in the center of it, had worked himself into a frenzy of excitement and was offering “Bright Eyes” stock at a million dollars a share.
“Don’t mind that kind of talk,” advised Mr. Flye. “He’s half tight, and his coco ain’t just right when he gets to talking in a crowd, but you needn’t worry but what his news is all right. And you can see for yourself!”
Several men were larruping cayuses up the street, bags dangling from saddle-bows.
“It’s the first of the rush for the ‘Bright Eyes’ section. Some of the critters out this way can beat firemen for quick action,” stated Mr. Flye. Perhaps to emphasize the fact that now at last he felt himself on a footing of intimate friendship with me, he plucked a cigar from my vest pocket and lighted up.
“I see you don’t smoke—you probably chaw,” he suggested, and he handed his plug to me.
When I state here that I promptly took the plug, whittled off a chunk, palmed it, and put some gum into my mouth, the depth of my esteem for Mr. Flye may be understood. I would rather have chewed that tobacco than hurt his feelings by refusing a friendly offer.
While we stood there a bearded man rode down the street, mud-covered.
“And there’s the man who will back me up!” squealed Maddox. “There comes the boss engineer! He knows what’s under cover in ‘Bright Eyes’!”
But the bearded man rode right through the crowd without answering questions. He alighted in front of the bank and went in, tugging something in his hand.
As a new, and somewhat heavy, stockholder in “Bright Eyes” gold-mine, I reckoned I’d try to get a little information from that engineer—I was quite sure that an Eastern capitalist who wore a silk hat and had a friend in the bank cashier might expect a little more attention than a street bystander. Therefore, with a word to my friend Flye I went over to find out the best or the worst.