However, apart from his curiosity and interest in this wild, waspish desert camp, Lex had by chance discovered, on the very day of his arrival, a far more important reason why he was glad he had come to Geerusalem. As he was driving his high-powered roadster up the main street his eye alighted on a modest little signboard nailed above a tiny store, crowded between two large adobe buildings. It read: “Mrs. Agatha Liggs, Dry Goods.”
He had read that modest little sign, with a thrill of joy. There could be but one Agatha Liggs in the whole wide world, he told himself, and that was the dear little woman whom he had known far back in his boyhood days—the mother of his chum and pal, Jerome Liggs.
His earliest memory of Mrs. Liggs and her son dated back to when he was five years old, living in the archaic town of San José, with his parents, during the dark period of his father’s striving to rise out of the rut of clerkship. The two families had been next-door neighbors for a number of years, and he remembered Jerome’s father as a big jovial man, who used to drive a truck by day and play cards with the elder Sangerly by night.
Jerome and Lex attended the same school. Mrs. Liggs’ son was a sturdy, fearless youngster, the dunce of his class. Lex, on the other hand, was timid and delicate, studious and a star scholar. Singularly enough, they had formed a great friendship, perhaps because of their very contrariness of character one to the other and their natural tendency to lean on each other, as it were. Lex never really knew how many times doughty Jerome had stepped in and thrashed a boy bully for him, but he did know that these services more than amply repaid him for the innumerable times that he had helped his champion with problems in arithmetic, grammar, spelling, and the rest of the educational mysteries. Nor could he ever remember the number of occasions he had shared Jerome’s bed overnight; nor had he ever forgotten the countless fat slices of Mrs. Liggs’ pumpkin pie he had devoured.
Up to the age of twelve, this Damon-Pythias comradeship had continued uninterruptedly. Then came the day when Sangerly, senior, had invented a cold-storage system that had promptly found marked favor with the Mohave & Southwestern Railroad, with the result that, besides purchasing his patents, it employed him to oversee the installation of the apparatus in its refrigerator cars.
In the years following the departure of the Sangerlys from San José, the Liggs’ family had dropped out of sight. Lex had once heard from a mutual friend that Jerome’s father had been killed in an accident, and that the widow had moved to the southern part of the State. But though he had never found out what had become of him, he always retained a tender memory of his boy chum, and there seemed nothing that could ever blot out his respect for the lowly pumpkin pie. Now here at last, he had suddenly discovered, in this uproarious frontier settlement of Geerusalem, of all places, the motherly little Mrs. Liggs.
It is scarcely to be wondered at then, that after his talk with Lemuel Huntington in the U. & I. saloon, and before he began his search for the vanished twenty thousand dollars, he must first pay a visit to that diminutive dry-goods store on the main street. At the very moment that Dot’s father was speeding out of town in the automobile that was to take him and his daughter on the first leg of their journey to San Francisco, Lex brought his roadster to a stop before Mrs. Liggs’ establishment.
He found to his surprise that the place was to all appearances closed for the day, the blind drawn down over the display window. Nevertheless, he knocked sharply and peered into the dark interior through the small glass panel in the upper half of the door. Presently the door in the rear of the store opened, and, after a short hesitation, the proprietress herself came walking slowly forward, wiping her eyes on her apron, arranging her white hair and smoothing out her immaculate, stiffly-starched dress. The next moment she was standing in the doorway, looking inquiringly at him through her spectacles.
“Mother Liggs! Bless your dear old heart!” he cried out in a voice vibrant with feeling. “Don’t you know me? Lex Sangerly!” He beamed on her, while she, squinting up at him, searched his face with infinite gravity, a trace of suspicion in her look.
She was a tiny, tired-out mite of a woman, around sixty-five, her hair like snowy silk, her eyes a faded blue, large, and just now showing indications of recent tears. Her dress, muslin and rather old-fashionedly made, was the most correct thing in feminine attire worn in the camp; at least, so declared the godless population of Geerusalem.