When I arrived at San Diego I found it would be advisable to hire a horse, for 188th street, instead of waiting for the Elmwood Avenue electric car, and when I asked for directions a red-headed man whose father was Irish and whose mother was Chinese, offered to act as guide for twenty dollars. He said, though, he would furnish his own outfit. I demurred and he went away. I was told that some eight miles out beyond the range I would find a water-hole, and that if I held to the southwest after leaving this hole, keeping my horse's ears between the double peak of a distant mountain called Little Two Top, I would come after a while to a lamp-post with a tarantula's nest where the lamp should have been. It would be hard to miss this lamp-post, they told me, as the desert was very flat thereabouts, and the lamp-posts could be seen for a radius of ten miles. Also, there might be water there—the horse would smell it out if there was. Also, it was a good place to camp, because of a tiny ledge of shale outcropping there. I was to be particular about this lamp-post, because it stood at the corner of Elmwood avenue and 188th street.
When I asked about the Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, information was less explicit. They shook their heads. One of them seemed to recollect a "shack" about a mile hitherward of Two Top, a statement that was at once contradicted by someone else. Might have been an old Digger "wicky-up." Sometimes the Indians camped in the valley on their way to ghost dances and tribal feasts. It wasn't a place for a white man to live, chiefly because the climate offered so many advantages and attractions to horned toads, tarantulas and rattlesnakes. Then the red-headed Chinese-Irishman came back and said, with an accent that was beyond all words, that a sheepherder had once told him of a loco-man out beyond McIntyre's waterhole, and another man said that, "Yes, that was so; he'd passed flasks with a loco-man out that way once last June, when he was out looking for a strayed pony. In fact, the loco-man lived out there, had a son, too, leastways a kid lived with him." This seemed encouraging. The Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, was accredited with a son—so his wife had said, who should know. So I started out, simultaneously hoping and dreading that the loco-man and the honourable Truax might be one flesh.
I left San Diego at four o'clock A.M. to avoid as much as possible the heat of mid-day, and just at sunset saw what might have been a cactus plant standing out stark and still on the white blur of sage and alkali like an exclamation point on a blank page. It was the lamp-post of the spider's nest that marked the intersection of Elmwood avenue and 188th street. And then my horse shied, with his hind legs only, in the way good horses have, and Ralph Truax-Steele rose out of a dried muck-hole under the bit.
I had expected a madman, but his surprise and pleasure at seeing me were perfectly sane. After awhile he said: "Sorry, old boy. It's the hospitality of the Arab I can give you; nothing better. A handful of dates (we call 'em caned prunes out here), the dried flesh of a kid (Californian for jerked beef), and a mouthful of cold water, which the same we will thicken with forty-rod rye; incidentally, coffee, black and unsweet, and tobacco, which at one time I should have requested my undergroom to discontinue."
We went to his "shack" (I observed it to be built of discarded bricks, mortared with 'dobe mud) and I was made acquainted with his boy, Carrington Truax-Steele, fitting for Oxford under tutelage of his father.
We had supper, after which the Hon. Truax, Sr. stood forth under the kindling glory of that desert twilight by that incongruous, reeling lamp-post, booted, bare-headed and woolen-shirted, and to the low swinging scimitar of the new welded moon declaimed Creon's speech to Oedipus in sonorous Greek. When he was done he exclaimed, abruptly: "Come along, I'll show you 'round."
I looked about that stricken reach of alkali, and followed him wondering. That evening the Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Oxon, showed me his real estate and also, unwittingly, the disordered workings of his brain. The rest I guessed and afterwards confirmed.
Steele had gone mad over the real estate "boom" that had struck the town five years previously, when land was worth as many dollars as could cover it, and men and women fought with each other to buy lots around the water hole called Amethyst Lake. The "boom" had collapsed, and with it Steele's reason, for to him the boom was on the point of recommencing; sane enough on other points, in this direction the man's grip upon himself was gone for good.
"There," he said to me that evening as we crushed our way through the sagebrush, indicating a low roll on the desert surface, "there are my villa sites, here will run a driveway, and yonder where you see the skeleton of that steer I'm thinking of putting up a little rustic stone chapel."
"Ralph, Ralph," I said, "come out of this. Can't you see that the whole business is dead and done for long since? You're going back with me to God's country to-morrow—going back to your wife, you and the boy. She sent me to fetch you."