Godsend to a Lady

by B. M. Bower

Eighty miles more or less straight away across the mountainous waste lay Lund, halfway up a cañon that led to higher reaches in the hills rich in silver, lead, copper, gold. Silver it was that Casey had found and sold to the men from Tonopah—and it was a freak of luck, he thought whimsically, that had led him and his Ford away over to Ghost Mountain to find their stake when they had probably been driving over millions every day that they made the stage trip from Pinnacle down to Lund. For Casey, be it known, was an old stage driver turned prospector. He had a good deal to think of while he drove, and he had time enough in which to think it.

The trail was rutted in places where the sluicing rains had driven hard across the hills; soft with sand in places where the fierce winds had swept the open. For a while the thin, wabbly track of a wagon meandered over the road, then turned off up a flat-bottomed draw and was lost in the sagebrush. Some prospector not so lucky as he, thought Casey with swift, soon-forgotten sympathy.

A coyote ran up a slope toward him, halted with forefeet planted on a rock and stared at him, ears perked like an inquisitive dog. Casey stopped, eased his rifle out of the crease in the back of the seat cushion, chanced a shot and his luck held. He climbed out, picked up the limp gray animal, threw it into the tonneau and went on. Even with twenty-five thousand dollars in his pocket, Casey told himself that coyote hides are not to be scorned. He had seen the time when the price of a good hide meant flour and bacon and tobacco to him. He would skin it when he stopped to eat.

Eighty miles with never a soul to call good day to Casey. Nor shack nor shelter made for man, nor water to wet his lips if they cracked with thirst—unless, perchance, one of those swift downpours came riding on the wind, lashing the clouds with lightning. Then there was water, to be sure. Far ahead of Casey such a storm rolled in off the barren hills to the south. “She’s wettin’ up that red lake a-plenty,” observed Casey, squinting through the dirty windshield. “No trail around, either, on account of the lava beds. But I guess I can pull acrost, all right.”

Doubt was in his voice, however, and he was half minded to turn back and take the straight road to Vernal, which had been his first objective. But he discarded the idea. “No, sir, Casey Ryan never back-trailed yet. Poor time to commence now, when I got the world by the tail and a downhill pull. We’ll make out, all right—can’t be so terrible boggy with a short rain like that there. I bet,” he continued optimistically to the Ford, which was the nearest he had to human companionship, “I bet we make it in a long lope. Git along, there! Shake a hoof—’s the last time you haul Casey around.

“Casey’s goin’ to step high, wide, and handsome. Sixty miles an hour or he’ll ask for his money back. They can’t step too fast for Casey! Blue—if I git me a girl with yella hair, mebby she’ll show up better in a blue car than she will in a white and red. This here turnout has got to be tasty and have class. If she was dark—” He shook his head at that. “No, sir, black hair grows too plenty on squaws an’ chili queens. Yella goes with Casey. Clingin’ kind with blue eyes—that’s the stuff! An’ I’ll sure show her some drivin’!”

He wondered whether he should find the girl first and buy the car to match her beauty, or buy the car first and with that lure the lady of his dreams. It was a nice question and it required thought. It was pleasant to ponder the problem, and Casey became so lost in meditation that he forgot to eat when the sun flirted with the scurrying clouds over his wind-torn automobile top.

So he came bouncing and swaying down the last mesa to the place called Red Lake. Casey had heard it spoken of with opprobrious epithets by men who had crossed it in wet weather. In dry weather it was red clay caked and checked by the sun, and wheels or hoofs stirred clouds of red dust that followed and choked the traveler. In rain it was said to be boggy, and travelers failed to travel at all.

Casey was not thinking of the lake when he drove down to it. He was seeing visions, though you would not think it to look at him; a stocky, middle-aged man who needed a shave and a hair cut, wearing cheap, dirt-stained overalls and blue shirt and square-toed shoes studded thickly on the soles with hobnails worn shiny; driving a desert-scarred Ford with most of the paint gone and a front fender cocked up and flapping crazily, and tires worn down to the fabric in places.

But his eyes were very blue and there was a humorous twist to his mouth, and the wrinkles around his eyes meant Irish laughter quite as much as squinting into the sun. If he dreamed incongruously of big, luxurious cars gorgeous in paint and nickel trim, and of slim, young women with yellow hair and blue eyes—well, stranger dreams have been hidden away behind exteriors more unsightly than was the shell which holds the soul of Casey Ryan.