“We looked all over,” Joe shrugged.
“The one that’s missing,” Dan said, “is the fellow that griped about the canteen. I remember his black hair.”
They carried the still-living man over to Charlie’s house and left him to the ministrations of the capable Stella. Charlie returned to the store, got a pick and shovel from a rack, handed one to Ben Brandt and one to Cranky Casey. Not a word was spoken to them. They took the tools and started toward the little cemetery at the mouth of Dublin Gulch.
I joined Dan on the bench. “Well,” Dan said, “they saved the price of a canteen.”
Two spinsters—teachers of zoology in a fashionable eastern school for girls—came in search of a place they called Metbury Springs. Brown told them there were no such springs in the Death Valley region. Obviously disappointed, one produced a map, spread it on the counter, ran her finger over a maze of notes and looking up asked what sort of rats lived about Shoshone. Charlie told them that very few rats survived their natural enemies and were seldom seen.
“What do they look like?” the teacher asked.
“Just regular rats,” Charlie told her.
Again she consulted her notes. “Do you mean to say the only rat you’ve seen here is Mus decumanus?”
“Mus who?” Charlie asked. “Only rats around here besides the two-legged kind are just plain everyday rats.”
The ladies gathered up their papers, went outside, looked over the hills, consulted their maps, and returned to Brown. “Sir, this is Metbury Spring,” one announced, “and for your own information we may add that in no other place in the world is there a rat like the one you have here.”