“This is Tinnemaha Pete, Lex,” said Mrs. Liggs. “He’s my prospector, and some day we’re going to strike it rich. Ain’t we, Pete? This is Mr. Sangerly. I knew him when he wore long curls, Pete, and he used to cuddle up in my lap and go to sleep. Didn’t you, Lex?”
“I see that ornery skunk, Lem Huntington, sashayin’ round in a ottermobile—too cussed lazy to drive hisself,” cackled the funny, little old man. “Hell burn his rotten hide! I’d like to—— Hoo, hoo! I’ll fix the stink-cat. See ef I don’t! What’s yore business, Mr. Spangaree? You’re sorter high-toned, ain’t you? City duck, what?” He tossed a bulging canvas sack he carried on his shoulder into a corner of the room. “There’s some rock, Agatha—tol’rable good, tol’rable good.”
Tinnemaha Pete was a horrible example of what the Southwestern desert does to men who sneer at its death-dealing forces and flirt with its snares too long. His body was warped, twisted, broken, his skin dry and tough as weathered leather, his eyes rheumy, burned out by sun glare. A pathetically few thin long hairs of beard still remained to him, and a scanty rim of gray circling the back of his bony, bald head, were the only evidences of a once shaggy brown thatch with which nature had endowed him.
Tinnemaha Pete, however, knew the Mohave Desert from center to circumference better than any man of those times, it was freely conceded. Whatever that gaunt, fiery, dead land had done to him, however hard it had striven to lay him a paralyzed heap to roast alive on its molten bosom, it had not killed the questing spirit of the prospector in him. Winter and summer, for a quarter of a century and more, he had searched and searched and searched that vast solitude for the undiscovered treasures which his experience told him must be somewhere embedded in those countless, chromatic ranges that crisscrossed that untrodden principality.
Through his years of wandering he had come to know the face of the Mohave as intimately as he knew the vile, black, short-stemmed pipe he smoked. What was equally, if not more, important, he had taught Billy Gee what he knew of that desert, thereby making the bandit invincible when fleeing over this no man’s land, with posses yelping at his heels.
A few minutes after the arrival of Tinnemaha Pete, Lex took his departure. Mrs. Liggs saw him to the street door and stood watching him wistfully as he drove away up the street. Then she shuffled tiredly back to the living room, dropped into a chair, and buried her face in her hands. Tinnemaha Pete peered hard at her, his lips moving, guttural sounds issuing from his throat.
“What ails ye?” he cried out. “What ails ye, Agatha?”
And because he surmised and was powerless to help her, he started a wild falsettoed string of abuse leveled at Lemuel Huntington, Sheriff Warburton, and that destiny to whose exactions all men must yield themselves.
“Jerome, son!” sobbed Mrs. Liggs forlornly. “Why couldn’t you have been like him? Dear God, what have I done that I should suffer like this? My burden is so heavy. Lord, so awful heavy. Pete—Pete, that was Jerome’s chum, his boyhood chum. And I—I had to tell him Jerome was—was dead. I—I just couldn’t tell him the—the truth.”
The queer old desert rat broke into a gale of insane laughter. “Mark me! Cuss-durn me, you mark me, Agatha!” he squeaked excitedly, his watery eyes afire. He trotted up to her side and shook a dried claw of a finger into her face. “Mark ye! Let Jerome boy git clear of that scalawag politician sheriff, an’ he’ll be off like a jackrabbit! Hain’t I learned him how to hide an’ go seek in that sand pile? Eh, hain’t I? Glory be, she’s a grand sand pile, Agatha! An’ he knows her, Jerome does—every hide-out, every water hole, the ol’ Injun trails, the ornery tricks of her an’—an’ there’s scores on scores of box cañons, that he knows, that he kin crawl out of an’ give Mr. Sheriff the hoss laugh. Yes, he kin. An’ nobody knows ’em, but me an’ him. Wommin! He’ll be off like a jackrabbit, I tell ye, wunst he’s in the clear.” He paused, glaring about the room. The canvas sack he had thrown in the corner caught his eye. “There’s the rock he asked you to have me git him, Agatha. It’s lousy—plumb lousy with gold, d’ye mark? An’ the ledge’ll go down to hell, she’s that true. I’ve called her the ‘Billy Geerusalem,’” he added in a furious whisper.