Frontier Boys in Frisco

by Wyn Roosevelt

James went slowly along, feeling the wall as he went, and all at once his fingers came to a slight break in the smooth wood, and the voices became slightly clearer and Jim was positive that he heard the thrum, thrum of a guitar. He ran his fingers up and down near the minute break, until they touched a small wooden button. He hesitated a moment before pressing it, not knowing what might happen nor what might possibly be on the other side.

"Nothing venture, nothing have," he said, and standing to one side he pressed the button and the door came quietly back.

"Well-oiled piece of machinery that," thought Jim; "I wonder who uses this stage entrance anyhow."

Then there came distinctly and clear the voices of several men singing a Mexican song and Jim saw several steps leading to a lower level under a low-arched passageway. He also heard besides the singing the low voices of men speaking and the occasional moving of a chair. He was soon to solve this particular mystery.

Moving cautiously along he reached the end of the short passageway and there he saw that it opened on a balcony that ran across one end of a high vaulted room, embellished with a beautifully carved ceiling of oak. As the balcony was quite high up and shut in by big panels of wood about four feet in height, he could not see the floor below.

Jim dared not raise his head to see who were in the room, which was evidently intended originally for a banquet hall and not a den of thieves. However, he was not long in doubt as to what to do, for he slipped the poniard from its sheath, and began to cut a hole through the wood in front of him and it did not take him long to have a place large enough to see perfectly what was going on below. He took one long earnest look.

"Gosh," he muttered to himself, "what a chance, what a chance; if I only had my revolver with me, I'd corner that gang in short order." And so he would.

Now this is what he saw, by the light of a mammoth fireplace filled with great logs that sent a weird, but beautiful light glowing and then wavering in shadows across the high arched ceiling. A few feet back from the wide high fireplace with its roaring flame were four men playing cards. They sat around a table, and three in appearance were villainous cutthroats, probably Mexicans by their dark visages, swaggeringly armed with knives and revolvers, with gaudy handkerchiefs knotted at their throats.

The firelight showed the flash of their cruel eyes and teeth at some stroke of fortune in the play, and Jim, who was not unaccustomed to see and deal with dubious citizens, felt that right below him was the hardest bunch that ill fortune had ever brought across his path. He was not forgetting either the Apaches with whom he and his brothers had enjoyed more than one fracas in the great Southwest.

But what the observer regarded with greatest interest was a group of three well back in the shadow, and he needed none to tell him who that short, squat figure was. He held a guitar, and was accompanying his own songs while the other two joined in the refrain. It was his bête noir, the Mexican dwarf who had recently robbed him, and out-maneuvered him on two occasions at least.