Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Charles Ray as Bob Rogeen,
and Barbara Bedford as Imogene Chandler.]
THE DESERT FIDDLER
BY
WILLIAM H. HAMBY
PHOTOPLAY TITLE
PERCY
ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES
FROM THE PHOTOPLAY
A THOS. H. INCE PRODUCTION
RELEASED BY PATHE PICTURES
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Charles Ray as Bob Rogeen, and
Barbara Bedford as Imogene Chandler . . . _Frontispiece_
Jenkins and Lolita awed by Percy's fiddling.
Lolita tries her wiles on Percy.
Reedy Jenkins makes a proposition to Imogene.
A mutual discovery--they both cared.
Holy Joe shanghaies Imogene's ranchmen and discovers
Percy--a willing ally.
"Make it plain to the Chandler girl that this is her
last chance to sell before I ruin her crop."
"Shut off the water? Why all the cotton in the valley
will be withered in a day."
THE DESERT FIDDLER
CHAPTER I
Bob Rogeen slept in the east wing of the squat adobe house. About
midnight there was a vigorous and persistent shaking of the screen door.
"Yes?" he called, sleepily.
"They have just telephoned in from the Red Butte Ranch"--it was Dayton,
his employer, at the door--"the engine on that tractor has balked.
They want a man out there by daylight to fix it."
Bob put up his arms and stretched, and replied yawningly:
"Well, I guess I'm the fixer."
"I guess you are," agreed the implement dealer. "You know the way,
don't you? Better ride the gray; and don't forget to take your gun."
The boss crossed the _patio_ to his own wing of the house.
The young fellow sat up and kicked along under the edge of the bed,
feeling for his shoes.
"A love--lee time to go to work," he growled, good-naturedly. "Here is
where the early bird catches the tractor--and the devil."
When he came out of the door a few minutes later, buttoning his
corduroy coat--even in Imperial Valley, which knows no winter, one
needs a coat on a March night--Rogeen stood for a moment on the step
and put up his long arms again to stretch some of the deep sleep from
his muscles. He was not at all enthusiastic about odd jobs at
midnight; but in a moment his eyes fell on the slanting moonlight that
shone mistily on the chinaberry tree in the _patio_; the town on the
American side was fast asleep; the wind with the smell of sagebrush
stirred a clump of bamboo. The desert night had him--and when he rode
away toward the Mexican line he had forgotten his gun and taken his
fiddle.
He passed through Mexicali, the Mexican town, where the saloons were
still open and the lights over the Red Owl, the great gambling hall,
winked with glittering sleeplessness; and out upon the road by the
irrigation canal, fringed with cottonwood and willows.
He let the reins drop over the saddlehorn, and brought the fiddle round
in front of him. There was no hurry, he would be there before
daylight. And he laughed as he ran his right thumb over the strings:
"What a combination--a fool, a fiddle, and a tractor."
Bob could not explain what impulse had made him bring a fiddle with him
on the way to mend a balky gasoline engine. As a youth--they had
called him rather a wild youth--he had often ridden through the Ozark
hills at night time with his fiddle under his arm. But in the last
eight years he had played the thing only once, and that once had come
so near finishing him that he still carried the receipt of the
undertaker who came to bury him the next day.
"Oh, well," Bob grinned into the night as he threw his right knee over
the saddlehorn and put the fiddle to his shoulder, "we'll see how she
goes once more."
For three miles he rode leisurely on, a striking figure in the dim
moonlight--a tall young man on a gray horse, fiddling wildly to the
desert night.
He crossed the bridge over the main canal, left the fringe of
cottonwood and willow, and turned across the open toward the Red Butte
Ranch. The fiddle was under his arm. Then he saw a shack in the open
field to the right of the road. It was one of those temporary
structures of willow poles and arrow weed that serve for a house for
the renter on the Mexican side. The setting moon was at its back, and
the open doorway showed only as a darker splotch. He lifted the fiddle
again. "Chinaboy, Jap, Hindu, Poor Man, Rich Man, Beggar Man or
Mexican--I'll give you a serenade all the samee."
The gleeful melody had scarcely jigged its way into the desert night
when, in the black splotch of the doorway, a figure appeared--a woman
in a white nightdress. Swiftly Bob changed the jig tune into a real
serenade, a clear, haunting, calling melody. The figure stood straight
and motionless in the dark doorway as long as he could see. Someway he
knew it was a white woman and that she was young.
He put the fiddle back in the bag and turned in his saddle to mark the
location of the hut in his mind--there was a clump of eucalyptus trees
just north of it. Yes, he would know the place, and he would learn
tomorrow who lived there. That listening figure had caught his
imagination.
But again he grinned into the night, ruefully this time as he
remembered the disaster that had followed his last two experiences with
this diabolical instrument of glee and grief.
"Oh, well," he shook his head determinedly and threw his leg across the
saddle, "the first time was with a preacher; the second with a gun; now
we'll give the lady a chance."
The fiddle and the figure in the doorway had stirred in Bob a lot of
reflections. At twenty he had given up his music and most of the
careless fun that went with it, because a sudden jolt had made him see
that to win through he must fight and not fiddle. For eight years he
had worked tremendously hard at half a dozen jobs across half a dozen
states; and there had been plenty of fighting. But what had he won?--a
job as a hardware clerk at twenty dollars a week.
"Oh, well"--he had learned to give the Mexican shrug of the
shoulder--"twenty dollars in a land of opportunity is better than fifty
where everything is already fixed."
That must be the Red Butte Ranch across yonder. He turned into the
left-hand fork of the road.
"Hello, there!" A tall, rambling fellow rose up from the side of the
road. "Are you the good Samaritan or merely one of the thieves?"
"Neither," replied Bob, guessing this was a messenger from the Red
Butte, "but I work for both. Where is your balky tractor?"
"This way." The rambling fellow turned to the right and started down
the road, talking over his left shoulder:
"I'm the chauffeur of that blamed tractor--I told Old Benson I didn't
know any more about it than he does of the New Jerusalem; but he put me
at it anyhow.
"I'm a willin' cuss. But the main trouble with me is I ain't got no
brains. If I had, I wouldn't be on this job, and if I was, I could fix
the darn thing myself.
"My dad," continued the guide, "was purty strong on brains, but I
didn't take after him much. If I was as posted on tractors as the old
man was on hell fire, I wouldn't need you."
Something in this hill billy's tone stirred in Bob a sudden
recollection.
"Was he a preacher?"
"Yep, named Foster, and I'm his wandering boy to-night."
Bob lifted his head and laughed. It was a queer world. He inquired
about the trouble with the tractor.
"I sure hope you can fix it," said Noah Ezekiel. "Old Benson will
swear bloody-murder if we don't get the cotton in before the tenth of
April. He wants to unload the lease."
The sun was scarcely an hour high when the steady, energetic chuck,
chuck of the tractor engine told Bob his work was done. He shut it
off, and turned to Noah Ezekiel.
"There you are--as good as new. And it is worth ten men and forty
mules. Not much like we used to farm back in the Ozarks, is it?"
"We?" Noah Ezekiel rubbed his lean jaw and looked questioningly at the
fixer. "I'm from the Ozarks, but as the silk hat said to the ash can,
'Where in hell does the _we_ come in?'"
"You don't happen to remember me?" There was a humorous quirk at the
corner of Rogeen's mouth as he stood wiping the oil and grease from his
hands with a bunch of dry grass.
The shambling hill billy took off his floppy-brimmed straw hat and
scratched his head as he studied Bob with the careless but always alert
blue eyes of the mountain-turkey hunter--eyes that never miss the turn
of a leaf nor forget a trail.
Those eyes began at the feet, took in the straight waistline, the
well-knit shoulders. Bob weighed a hundred and eighty and looked as
though he were put together to stay. For a moment Noah Ezekiel studied
the friendly mouth, the resolute nose, the frank brown eyes; but not
until they concentrated on the tangled mop of dark hair did a light
dawn on the hill billy's face.
"Well, I'll be durned!" The exclamation was deep and soul-satisfying,
and he held out his hand. "If you ain't Fiddlin' Bob Rogeen, I'll eat
my hat!"
"Save your hat." Bob met the recognition with a friendly grin.
"I never saw you but once," reflected Noah Ezekiel, "and that was the
Sunday at Mt. Pisgah when my dad lambasted you in his sermon for
fiddlin' for the dance Saturday night."
"That sermon," Bob's smile was still a little rueful, "lost me the best
job I had ever had."
"Oh, well," consoled the hill billy, "if you hadn't lost it somethin'
might have fell on you. That's what I always think when I have to move
on." And he repeated with a nonchalant air a nonsensical hill parody:
_I eat when I'm hungry,
I drink when I'm dry,
And if a tree don't fall on me
I'll live till I die._
Then his eyes veered round to Bob's fiddle lying to one side on the
grass.
"I notice," he grinned, "dad did not convert you."
"No," said Bob, "but he cured me--almost. I've only played the thing
twice since."
Rogeen picked up his fiddle and started for his horse.
"Well, so long, Noah. You've got a nice place to work out here." His
eyes swept almost covetously over the five-thousand-acre ranch, level
as a floor, not a stump or a stone. "If I had this ranch I'd raise six
thousand bales of cotton a year, or know the reason why."
"That ain't what the last fellow said," remarked the hill billy,
grinningly. "Reedy Jenkins was out yesterday figuring on buyin' the
lease; and he said: 'If I had it--I'd raise the rent.'"