SPIES
Smith, the shaggy, mouse-coloured burro, lifted his voice in that
sobbing wail of welcome which has caused his kind to be designated as
desert canaries, as Oliver rode into the pasture. Smith's was a
gregarious soul. To be left entirely alone was torture. His ears were
twelve inches long, and the protuberances over his eyes were so craggy
that Oliver had hesitated between the names of Smith and William Cullen
Bryant. On the whole, though, "Smith" had seemed more companionable.
Oliver loosed Poche to console the lonesome heart of Smith and went at
the irrigating of his garden. When a stream of water was trickling along
every hoed furrow he put on heavy hobnailed laced-boots and went into
the hills in search of his third bee tree.
It seems illogical to set down that one could live for nearly two months
on forty acres of land without having explored every square foot of it.
But Oliver had not trod upon at least two thirds of his property. Locked
chaparral presents many difficulties. Farmers detest it, and artists go
wild over it. But farmers are obliged to sprawl flat and crawl through
it occasionally, while artists sit on their stools at a distance from it
that brings out all the alluring browns and yellows and greens and
olives of which it is capable under the magic of the changing sunlight.
Oliver had seen bees darting like arrows from the flowers in the
creekbed in a westerly direction, up over the thickest of the chaparral.
Up there somewhere was another colony of winged misers and their hoarded
wealth of honey. Honey was bringing a good price just then, and a
merchant at Halfmoon Flat would buy it. So now the beeman climbed the
hill and crawled into the chaparral in the direction the insects had
flown.
Scattered here and there through the dense thicket were pines and spruce
and black oak. In one of these trees the bees must have their home; and
his task of finding it was not entirely a haphazard quest. When he
crawled to an opening in the bushes he would climb into the crotch of
one of them and locate the nearest tree. Then, flattening himself once
more, he would crawl to this tree and look for a hollow for the bees.
Finding none, he would locate another tree and crawl to it.
Thus wearisomely engaged he crawled into a depression three feet deep in
the earth beneath him. This allowed him to sit erect for the first time
in minutes, and he availed himself of the chance, industriously mopping
his brow.
Now, Oliver Drew was not a miner, but he was a son of the outdoor West
and knew at once that he was seated in an ancient prospect hole. About
the excavation were piled the dirt and stones that had been shovelled
out.
He speculated over it. For all he knew, it might date back to the
fascinating days of '49. A great forest of pines might have stood here
then. Or maybe the pines had been burned away, and a forest of gigantic
oaks had followed the conifers, to rear themselves majestically above
the pigmies that delved, oftimes impotently, for the glittering yellow
treasure at their roots. Or, again, the prospect hole might have been
dug years later, after the oaks had disappeared and the chaparral had
claimed the land. There was no way of telling, for every decade or so
forest fires swept the country almost clean, and some new growth
superseded the old in Nature's endless cycle.
Fifty feet farther on he plopped into a second prospect hole, and a
little beyond that he found a third.
He noted now that in all cases no chaparral grew up through the muck
that had been thrown out. This would seem to signify that the work had
been done in recent years, while the bushes that now claimed the land
still grew there. He found a fourth hole soon, and near it were
manzanita stumps, the tops of which had been cut off with an ax.
This settled it. While the soil might show evidences of the work of man
for an interminable length of time, the roots of the lopped-off
manzanitas would rot in a decade, perhaps, and freezing weather would
loosen the stumps from their moorings. But this wood was still sound.
The prospecting had been done not many years before. And who had been
prospecting thus on patented land?
When he had wormed his way to the crest of a hill he had passed about
twenty of these shallow holes. Now, at the top, the earth had been
literally gophered. The workings here looked newer still; and presently
he came upon evidence that proved work had been done not longer than a
year before, for dry leaves still clung to the tops of manzanita bushes
that had been chopped off and pitched to one side.
It has been stated that he was not a miner. Still, having been born and
raised in a mining country, he knew something of the geological
formations in which gold ordinarily is found. He was in a gold producing
country now, yet the specimens that he picked up near the prospect holes
proved that only a rank tenderfoot would have searched so persistently
in this locality.
He picked up a bit of white substance and gave it study. It resembled
lithia. The water of his spring contained a trace of lithium salts,
according to the analysis furnished him by the State Agricultural
College, to which he had mailed a sample. He pocketed the specimen for
future reference.
As he sat on the edge of this hole, with his feet in it, he heard a
rustling in the bushes close at hand. At first he thought it might be
caused by a jackrabbit; but soon it became certain that some heavier,
larger body was making its way slowly through the chaparral.
A coyote? A bobcat? A deer?
He carried no gun today, and the swift thought of a mountain lion was a
bit unpleasant.
He quickly slid from his seat and stretched himself on the ground in the
shallow excavation. Oliver was an ardent student of nature, and he liked
nothing better than secretly to watch some wild thing as it moved about
it its customary routine, unconscious of the gaze of human eyes. Once he
had hidden in wild grapevines and watched a skunk searching for bugs
along a creekbed, until suddenly the moist bank crumbled beneath him,
and he fell, and--But what followed is what might be called an unsavory
story.
The crackling, scraping sounds drew nearer, but whatever was making them
was not moving directly toward him. They ceased abruptly, and then he
knew that the man or animal had reached the open space in the brush in
which the prospect holes were situated.
As the noises were not continued, he began raising himself slowly, until
he was able to look over the edge of the hole.
It was not a browsing deer nor a hunting coyote upon which he gazed. A
squat, dark man, with chaps and spurs and Stetson, was making his way
across the open space to the continuation of the chaparral beyond it.
His eyes were mere slits, black, Mongolic.
He was Digger Foss, the half-white, right-hand man of Adam Selden.
The progress of the gunman was not stealthy, for undoubtedly he
considered himself particularly safe from observation up here in the
wilderness of chaparral. He slouched bow-leggedly across the break in
the thicket, and dropped to hands and knees when he reached the edge of
it. He disappeared in the chaparral.
The general direction that he was pursuing was straight toward Oliver's
cabin. Oliver lay quite still and listened to the renewed sounds of his
progress through the prickly bushes.
Then once more they stopped suddenly. Oliver knew that in the short
space of time elapsed Digger Foss could not have crawled beyond the
reach of his hearing. He had paused again.
For perhaps five minutes he listened, but could hear no further sounds.
Then from not far distant there came the familiar clatter of a dry pine
cone in the manzanita tops.
A moment more and Oliver was smiling grimly. For Foss had suddenly
appeared above the tops of the chaparral. He was climbing a giant digger
pine, which only a short time before Oliver had investigated as the
possible home of the bees he was striving to find. There in plain sight
the halfbreed was climbing like a bear from limb to limb, keeping the
trunk of the tree between his chunky body and the cabin in the valley.
Presently he settled astride a horizontal bough on Oliver's side, his
back toward the watcher. He adjusted himself as comfortably as possible,
and then there appeared in his hands a pair of binoculars. Leaning
around the tree trunk, screened by the digger pine's long,
smoke-coloured needles, he focused the glasses on the cabin down below.
It looked to Oliver Drew as if this were not the first time that the
gunman had perched himself up there to watch proceedings in the canyon.
There had been no hesitancy in his selection of a tree which stood in
such a position that other trees would not obstruct his view from its
branches, no studying over which limb he might occupy to the best
advantage.
Vaguely Oliver wondered how many times he had laboured and moved about
down below, with the keen, black, Chinese eyes fixed on him. It was not
a comfortable feeling, by any means.
Now, though, his thoughts were taken up by the problem of getting away
unobserved by the spyglass man. Digger Foss was not a hundred feet from
where Oliver lay and watched him. If he should turn for an instant he
would see Oliver there, flat on his face in the excavation, for the
halfbreed's perch was twenty feet above the tops of the chaparral.
Oliver had decided to make a try at crawling on up the hill as
noiselessly as possible, when new and far slighter sounds came to his
ears. So slight they were indeed that, if he had not been close to the
earth, he might not have detected them at all.
But no bird or small animal could be responsible for them, for they were
continuous and dragging. Once again he hugged the ground while he
watched and waited.
The sounds came on--sounds that seemed to be the result of some one's
dragging something carefully over the shattered leaves on the ground.
And presently there hove into view another human being.
He was an Indian--a Showut Poche-daka. Oliver remembered his swarthy
face, his inscrutable eyes. He had been pointed out to him at the fiesta
by Jessamy as the champion trailer of all the Paubas, of which the
Showut Poche-daka Tribe was a sort of branch. Often, Jessamy had said,
this Indian, who was known by the odd and laughable name of Tommy My-Ma,
had been employed by the sheriff of the county in tracking down escaped
prisoners or fleeing transgressors against the law.
He wore no hat. He was barefooted. His only covering seemed to be a pair
of faded-blue overalls and a colourless flannel shirt. Neither did he
carry any weapon, so far as Oliver could see.
His progress was now soundless as he came from the chaparral, flat on
his belly, wriggling along like a lizard with surprising speed. His
black, glittering eyes were unquestionably fixed with rapt intentness on
the man aloft in the digger pine; and by reason of this alone he did not
see Oliver Drew.
His movements commenced to be extraordinary. He wriggled himself
speedily over the unlittered earth and made no sound. There was a pile
of dry brush at one edge of the clearing, the tops of the bushes that
had been cut off to facilitate the sinking of the prospect holes. Toward
this Tommy My-Ma glided; and when he reached it he passed out of sight
on the other side.
Then suddenly he reappeared again. Instantly he lowered his head to the
ground at the edge of the pile of brush; then swiftly the head and
shoulders disappeared, the trunk and legs following. For a second Oliver
saw the bare brown feet, then they too went out of sight.
Oliver understood the disappearing act of Tommy My-Ma, he thought. The
pile of brush covered another of the prospect holes, and into the hole
the Showut Poche-daka had snaked himself. It seemed that he too had
sought a hiding place often frequented. In there he perhaps could sit
erect and, screened by the pile of brush, would be entirely hidden,
while he himself could watch the spy in the branches of the digger pine.
For that he was in turn spying on the man who was watching Oliver's
cabin Oliver did not for a moment doubt.
But why? That was another matter!
He was quite aware of his own unprotected position; and with Tommy My-Ma
now hidden in the brush scarce fifty feet away from him, he dared not
get out of his hole and try to crawl away.
The situation struck him as ridiculous in the extreme. Foss trying to
spy on him; Tommy My-Ma spying on Foss--the object of all this intrigue,
Oliver himself, spying on both of them!
And how long must it continue?
The only sounds now were the soft moaning of the wind through the
needles of the pines, and from afar, occasionally, the clear, cool call
of a valley quail: "Cut that out! Cut that out!" The sun was hot on the
resinous needles of the pines, and the smell of them filled the air.