THERE were four or five passengers inside the coach, and I boosted the
judge over the wheel and put him in there. There was no one on the box
with the driver, and that was not surprising, for I must say he did not
have any coaxing way with him: he had his fists full of muddy reins and
looked down on me with his mouth screwed around. I asked meekly if I
might ride up there with him.
“If you think a plug-hat is going to help me any getting acrost sixteen
miles of ’dobe clay, climb up! But do one thing or t’other damn quick!”
It did not look as if I would be making a specially promising friend,
but I climbed just the same.
“Good luck!” said the landlord, “and I hope you’ll take it all right
from us if we let ’em loose after we have shaken ’em down.”
“Send ’em along, sir. One at a time or the lot in a bunch!”
That little speech suited the crowd; I got a lot of friendly hand-waves.
A few rods from the last house in Royal City the muddy street swung to
the right and sort of sneaked into the river, as if it were ashamed
and wanted to wash the dirt off itself. There was no bridge. The
horses plunged into the water and dragged the coach across the stream,
floundering in depths that barely allowed them footing.
On the other side of the river the road whiplashed in long curves up the
canon’s wall to reach the level of Callas prairie; I should say it was
all of a thousand feet above the stream.
I offered to the driver comments on the weather, on the road: I offered
him a cigar. I had stocked up with smokes with which to curry favor. The
driver paid no attention to the comments and snarled his refusal of the
cigar. Even with six horses leaping to their work under the lash, our
crawl up the muddy slope was snail-like. The wheelers and swing team got
the whip, and the driver heaved curses and little rocks at the leaders.
He had nearly a peck of pebbles in a canvas bag at his side. When we
were over the rim-rock at last and upon the prairie, I looked for more
speed. But no such luck! The straining horses, half-way to their knees
in the black mud, could barely move the heavy coach.
After a time the driver left what some flatterers might call a road
and took to the open prairie, zigzagging here and there to find solid
ground. Then intersecting gullies drove him back into the rutted road
again. It was adobe mud--black as zip and as sticky as cold molasses.
Every little while the driver was obliged to jump down from his seat and
poke the clotted mud out between the spokes of the wheels. Otherwise
the coach would have been anchored in spite of the best tussles of the
horses.
“I should think they’d have to give up trying to run a stage across this
prairie in mud-time,” I ventured to suggest to the driver when he came
climbing back to his seat after a long assault on the mud-clogged wheels
with his piece of joist.
“The mails _have_ to go, but the damn fools that I haul don’t have to,”
he retorted, sorting his reins between his muddy fingers. “If you ain’t
satisfied with the way I’m running this thing, mister, you can tuck
yourself into that plug-hat of yours and roll across to Breed City.
E-e-oyah! Go ‘long, you wall-eyed, splint-legged goats of the Bitter
Root, you!”
However, I was thankful I was on the outside; the sun warmed me and the
warmth was grateful, for the breeze was chilly on that upland. I could
see snow on the far-distant peaks to the south. The passengers inside
the coach were plainly far from feeling any thankfulness whatsoever.
They groaned and growled and complained. I glanced down over the side
dining one stop for wheel-clearing, and found myself looking into the
face of Judge Kingsley, who had stuck his head out of the window. His
false mustache gave him the appearance of an angry cat.
“How much more of this devilishness have we got to endure?” he demanded.
“That’s easy figuring, sir! Sixteen miles, sixteen hours! It must be the
regular running time on this road.”
“I don’t want no sarcasm from no one,” yelped the driver, straightening
up and shaking his joist. “And if any gent reckons he can keep passing
out his cheap slurs on this trip he’d better come down here now and get
his card entitling him to.”
I kept my gaze on the distant mountains, but when the driver climbed
back to his seat and kept on cussing me out, I reckoned we’d better have
a little understanding for the rest of the trip. I closed my fingers
around his arm. It was only a pipe-stem arm--and his eyes were of the
sad, pale-blue kind. I said very near to his ear: “Your breakfast seems
to be hurting you, son! The stage company pays you to drive and to be
respectful to passengers. Mind your tongue after this.”
I was trying on a little something. I have found that when you bluster
and shout, the blusterer usually recognizes his own kind and blusters
back. But the blowhard hasn’t any weapon when a man fights with a look
and a quiet word.
“It’s the mud. It’s getting on to my nerves,” whined the man after he
had driven a short distance.
“Have a smoke--it’s good for the nerves,” I invited. The driver’s hands
were full of reins and whip and pebbles, so I set the end of a cigar to
the drooping mouth and the driver bit off the end. Then I held a match
while he sucked. And when the cigar was going he turned an appreciative
grin on me.
“A fellow can’t bluff you much, can he, mister?” he remarked. “I didn’t
have you sized up right at the start-off, I reckon. Why, _I_ couldn’t
lick a prairie-dog with a hammer. But I bluff out most of the dudes who
travel with me. I get a lot of innocent enjoyment that way. It helps
pass the time for me on this jodiggered trip.”
Out of his cocoon of grouchiness he broke as a real butterfly of
chatter. I got a lot of good stuff from him, for I learned the name
of the mayor of Breed City and what sort of a man he was--a dry-goods
merchant who took his job seriously and hollered about the development
of the new place and loved those who said a good word for the
municipality.
I also learned that many miners and prospectors from the Buffalo Hump
region were mudbound, on their annual spree, in Breed--the nearest town
where they could find all the rum and roulette they demanded. The driver
stated that one or two of his friends who had a little spare cash for
speculation made it a practice to loaf around the gambling-places
and buy in from busted players any mining shares that a man wanted to
realize on in a hurry. Most of these shares thus offered for sale were
shares in undeveloped prospects, the driver explained, but one could
never tell when a share bought for a cent would be worth a hundred. That
driver certainly liked the sound of his voice when he got started! He
offered the confidential tip that the Blacksnake Gully region would
develop into the howler of the season. It wasn’t being talked of much.
Nothing real definite was known outside. He guessed they hadn’t opened
up anything to prove the hunch some folks had--but mining is like
betting on the races. A tip floats in from somewhere--if a hunch goes
with it, play it, that was his motto. He had been able to pick up a few
loose shares.
The mine in which he was most interested had been located for a long
time. Shares had been out for some years, scattered around. He couldn’t
tell for sure who had started the new stories, but he did know that a
friend of his--an humble friend called “Dirty-shirt” Maddox--was up
in this section, nosing around, and he reckoned he’d get some inside
information when “Dirty-shirt” returned to Breed.
Of course I wasn’t surprised. My idea of the West was a place where
every man was trying to unload mining stock on an Eastern sucker.
“The particular claim in the Blacksnake that I’m speaking of is ‘Her
Two Bright Eyes,’” stated the gossiper. “Mebbe that name is a hunch that
it’s worth looking into,” he added, with a cackle to point his little
joke.
I thought of a couple of bright eyes, and felt homesick when the driver
drawled the name of the mine.
“Two bright eyes are always worth looking into,” said I.
That was some ride!
The stage wallowed into Breed City about nightfall. It had tipped over
twice on the way, its wheels sinking into “honey-pots” of mud, rolling
over slowly like a tired cow lying down to rest. We swearing passengers
had been compelled to pry it up with poles borrowed from a rancher.
During these waits and during the meal at a sort of half-way house,
Judge Kingsley, mud-spattered, scared into conniptions when he thought
of what would be coming behind us from Royal City, miserable as a wet
cat, and seeing nothing ahead for consolation, muttered to me constantly
his familiar taunt that he was being teamed about the country by a
lunatic.
I didn’t know exactly what to say, and made him still angrier by
confessing that he was undoubtedly correct.
We left the coach in front of the hotel that the driver had recommended,
and we stepped from the board sidewalk like passengers disembarking from
a boat; the mud in the street was fairly a river of mire.
“Even if you don’t like the ‘Prairie Pride’ very well,” my new friend
had said, “you’ll have a lot of fun watching the White Ghost operate.
There’s only one of his kind in these parts, or anywhere else in the
world, so fur’s I know. Folks come from a long ways off and stand around
the windows and doors of the ‘Prairie Pride’ hotel and see the White
Ghost perform. Oh no, I don’t mean that the house is haunted. The White
Ghost is the waiter. He’s the only waiter they have in the dining-room.
He won’t have anybody else there. He prides himself on doing it all
alone. Says he is the only waiter in the world who can handle fifty
guests and four Chinese cooks single-handed and keep everybody happy and
busy eating. He’s a little cracked in the head, but he’s sure a wonder
on his feet. A streak of white lightning would have to whistle for him
to turn around and come back and meet it.”
Now this bit of information, when I listened to it, stirred in me merely
a half-determination to go to another hotel, where the waiter did not
give a show along with his services.
How often does man slight some odd tools that Fate lays in his way,
especially when Fate doesn’t draw his attention to them!
The “Prairie Pride” hotel deserved its name in some measure. It had
smooth floors, real doors, and walls of plaster. Its big office thronged
with guests, whose character was plain enough. There were slick drummers
and bearded and booted miners fresh from the hills, down for a bit of a
spring whirl, and there were mining engineers and such like.
We were given a room and at the same time we were given a hint that we’d
better hurry to supper before the hungry mob cleaned up all the best
dishes. Again my clothes coaxed this courtesy!
“Cross the big dining-room and go into the alcove,” directed the clerk,
after a glance at my hat. “The alcove is for gents. We herd the others
in the big room.”
I crossed this main hall a few steps in advance of Judge Kingsley. Men
were crowded at the tables gobbling food. No fancy feeding! Men jabbed
knives into their mouths and grabbed stuff off plates and smacked their
lips and snuffled and grunted. I stopped in the alleyway between these
tables to look about. I heard a yell of warning and dodged just in time
to escape.
Double swinging doors with spring hinges were burst open by the impact
of a foot that must have been swung waist high for the kick. Out into
the dining-room shot the individual who had kicked.
It was an apparition!
He was more than six feet tall and as slim as a beanpole. He wore a
white cap, a white jacket, a white apron shrouded him to his heels,
and he wore white shoes. He had a white, peaked face and his hair was
tow-colored. On a huge tray that he held well above his head dishes were
heaped high. He went past me and down the alleyway on the dead run, and
wisps of steam from his load followed after, trailing on the air.
“You want to keep out of the road in this dining-room when the White
Ghost is on the rampage,” advised a guest at the table in the alcove
where we took seats. “He’s going to get somebody some day fine and
plenty. A few months ago he got old Babb Coan, who was down here on
crutches, nursing a broken leg, and couldn’t get out of the way in
season. But the White Ghost was loaded with empty dishes--just empties.
Some day he’s going to connect when he’s loaded with about seventeen hot
dinners.”
The next moment a white streak came into the alcove, took half a dozen
orders and darted back into the kitchen with a tray-load of empty
dishes.
“It advertises the hotel,” explained the talkative guest. “Men come here
from far and near to see the White Ghost razoo up and down the stretch,
but for me I’d rather have more waiters and less slamming. It keeps me
nervous, and when I’m nervous I can’t do justice to my vittles. I’m all
the time expecting to see that man that’s doomed to get _his_ get it.
It’ll be a mighty mushy affair.”
By this time the White Ghost was back and was scaling loaded dishes
about the table with a deftness that a quick dealer shows in a poker
game.
And I, still blind to what Fate was preparing for my side of the case,
was merely irritated by this tophet-te-larrup!
When supper was over we seized an opportunity when the White Ghost was
on an outward trip and escaped.
I advised the judge that he’d better take the key and go to our room
and get into bed, and the old man accepted that advice with a sigh
of thankfulness. He looked bent, weary, and broken as he climbed the
stairs; homesick hopelessness showed in every line of his face and in
every motion of his body. I did pity him then!
“Poor old father of the girl with the two bright eyes,” I said, not
realizing that I had spoken aloud.
A man sidled up and prodded me with his thumb.
“I heard what you said to the old gent just now! Where did you get your
tip, pard?” he whispered.