George Fayle, whom I had known in Goodsprings — associated with Sam Yount—had come over to the railroad to engage in the mercantile business. He owned a general store, a restaurant, and was building a hotel. This made matters fine for us—almost. Fayle was postmaster, and handled pouch mail between the postoffice and the trains. The gun he carried was only routine.
George Fayle took us to a ground-floor room in his unfinished hotel. The room had wallboard partitions, bed upon springs flat on the floor, with a blanket hung across the outside door opening, leaving one-fourth of the space with nothing but thin desert air between us and the unknown. George did not tell us what kind of characters he was harboring beyond the cardboard—but he did wish us a pleasant good night, and, patting his six-shooter, said we would be perfectly safe, as is.
But the wife did not readily catch the spirit of the West. I had told her that the desert was overrun with lizards and sidewinder rattlesnakes, the poisonous kind that travel in spiral form with head up ready for a strike at all times. She put in most of the remainder of the night watching the 18-inch opening between the blanket and the floor—precisely for what, she could not be sure. Luckily there was no wind. The blanket hung limp throughout the night. I can swear to that. Two of a kind, you might say.
At breakfast, George told me there had been a manhunt the day before over in the country west of Goodsprings — that an escaped convict was reportedly holed up in the hills east of Sandy. That would be in the neighborhood of our lead mine. The wife took this in without comment — but it was plain to be seen that she was stowing it away for future consideration.
When Frank and I had returned from our tour of inspection at Crescent, after nightfall, we found the Good-springs camp in an awful state of alarm. My wife, fully dressed, was sitting upright in the middle of the bed in our ground-floor room, afraid to put foot on the floor. She had been so since shortly after dusk. Dusk—that indeterminate translucent veil which, like a mist, screens and magnifies, transposing even the most common objects into phantom figures.
She had heard a scraping noise, likely a block away, but at such times the imagination does tricks to one’s reasoning. In her state of nervous tension, it was but natural for her to imagine that indistinct noise had come from under the bed, the obvious place for an intruder to hide.
Ordinarily Myrtle was not given to such fits of timidity. But she had entered the country under trying conditions, and therefore was not prepared for the many unexpected irregularities. We had not counted on our train being so far behind time as to land us out there in the middle of the night. With my memory of the surroundings as I last knew them, it required a lot of silent argument with myself to get up courage to subject her to the risk we must necessarily take in finding accommodations of any sort, at Jean. I knew there were ten miles of desert on either side of the railroad station. That the country was not inhabited might or might not have been in our favor. Certainly, it presaged loneliness—and it was dark.
A woman at the hotel in Goodsprings thought she had glimpsed the deadly thing, at dusk, near the sleeping quarters—and Myrtle’s door had been left open for a brief spell while she was out. Or rather the door had been found open on her return—she just wasn’t sure how it was. Myrtle informed me that all the other women in camp were just as frightened as she was. And she bade me look under the bed, forthwith.
The thing I was supposed to make sure was—or wasn’t — there, had an overall length of about two feet, a width of four to five inches, an inch or so less in height when inactive—and it was a little pot-bellied. It was rusty in color, with yellowish spots distributed the full length of its body. It had a fat meaty tail, and a broad ugly looking head.
There really was something alive under the bed. It moved. Its eyes moved toward me. Also there were now two people upon the bed. And simultaneously the door swung open, as if the devil was in cahoots with the thing, bent on letting in all the demons of a wicked world. I had hit the bed on the bounce with a jarring thud, causing the door to swing in, as it invariably did when not securely latched. And the cat “hightailed it” out into the night.