"At that," said Bill, grinning a little, "you'll know as much as the
average garage-man. What ain't reformed livery-stable men are second-hand
blacksmiths, and a feller like you, that has drove stage for fifteen
year--"
"Twenty," Casey Ryan corrected jealously. "Six years at Cripple Creek, and
then four in Yellowstone, and I was up in Montana for over five years,
driving stage from Dry Lake to Claggett and from there I come to Nevada--"
"Twenty," Bill conceded without waiting to hear more, "knows as much as a
man that has kept livery stable. Then again you've had two Fords--"
"Oh, I ain't sayin' I can't _run_ a garage," Casey interrupted. "I don't
back down from runnin' anything. But if you'd grubstake me for a year,
instead of settin' up this here garage at Patmos, I'd feel like I had a
better chance of makin' us both a piece uh money. There's a lost gold mine
I been wantin' fer years to get out and look for. I believe I know now
about where to hit for. It ain't lost, exactly. There's an old Injun been
in the habit of packin' in high grade in a lard bucket, and nobody's been
able to trail him and git back to tell about it. He's an old she-bear to
do anything with, but I got a scheme, Bill--"
"Ferget it," Bill advised. "Now you listen to me, Casey, and lay off that
prospectin' bug for awhile. Here's this long strip of desert from Needles
to Ludlow, and tourists trailin' through like ants on movin' day. And
here's this garage that I can get at Patmos for about half what the
buildin's worth. You ain't got any competition, none whatever. You've got
a cinch. There'll be cars comin' in from both ways with their tongues
hangin' out, outa gas, outa oil, needin' this and needin' that and looking
on that garage as a godsend--"
"Say, Bill, if I gotta be a godsend I'll go out somewheres and holler
myself to death. Casey's off that godsend stuff for life; you hear me,
Bill--"
"Glad to hear it, Casey. If you go down there to Patmos to clean up some
money for you 'n' me, you wanta cut out this soft-hearted stuff. Get the
money, see? Never mind being kind; you can be kind when you've got a stake
to be it with. Charge 'em for everything they git, and see to it that the
money's good. Don't you take no checks. Don't trust nobody for anything
whatever. That's your weakness, Casey, and you know it. You're too
dog-gone trusting. You promise me you'll put a bell on your tire tester
and a log chain and drag on your pump and jack--say, you wouldn't believe
the number of honest men that go off for a vacation and steal everything,
by golly, they can haul away! Pliers, wrenches, oil cans, tire testers--
say, you sure wanta watch 'em when they ask yuh for a tester! You can lose
more tire testers in the garage business--"
"Well, now, you watch Casey! When it comes to putting things like that
over, they wanta try somebody besides Casey Ryan. You ask anybody if
Casey's easy fooled. But I'd ruther go hunt the Injun Jim mine, Bill."
"Say, Casey, in this one summer you can make enough money in Patmos to
_buy_ a gold mine. I've been reading the papers pretty careful. Why, they
say tourist travel is the heaviest that ever was known, and this is early
May and it's only beginning. And lemme tell yuh something, Casey. I'd
ruther have a garage in Patmos than a hotel in Los Angeles, and by all
they say that's puttin' it strong. Ever been over the road west uh
Needles, Casey?"
Casey never had, and Bill proceeded to describe it so that any tourist who
ever blew out a tire there with the sun at a hundred and twenty and
running in high, would have confessed the limitations of his own
vocabulary.
"And there you are, high and dry, with fifteen miles of the ungodliest,
tire-chewinest road on either side of yuh that America can show. About
like this stretch down here between Rhyolite and Vegas. And hills and
chucks--say, don't talk to me about any Injun packin' gold in a lard
bucket. Why, lemme tell yuh, Casey, if you work it right and don't be so
dog-gone kind-hearted, you'll want a five-ton truck to haul off your
profits next fall. I'd go myself and let you run this place here, only I
got a lot of credit trade and you'd never git a cent outa the bunch. And
then you're wantin' to leave Lund for awhile, anyway."
"You could git somebody else," Casey suggested half-heartedly. "I kinda
hate to be hobbled to a place like a garage, Bill. And if there's anything
gits my goat, it's patchin' up old tires. I'll run 'em flat long as
they'll stay on, before I'll git out and mend 'em. I'd about as soon go to
jail, Bill, as patch tires for tourists; I--"
"You don't have to," said Bill, his grin widening. "You sell 'em new
tires, see. There won't be one in a dozen you can't talk into a new tire
or two. Whichever way they're goin', tell 'em the road's a heap worse from
there on than what it was behind 'em. They'll buy new tires--you take it
from me they will. And," he added virtuously, "you'll do 'em no harm
whatever. If you got a car, you need tires, and a new one'll always come
in handy sometime. You know that yourself, Casey.
"Now, I'll put in an assortment of tires, and I'll trust you to sell 'em.
You and the road they got to travel. Why, when I was in Ludlow, a feller
blew in there with a big brute of a car--36-6 tires. He'd had a blow-out
down the other side of Patmos and he was sore because they didn't have no
tires he could use down there. He bought three tires--_three,_ mind yuh,
and peeled off the bills to pay for 'em! Sa-ay when yuh figure two hundred
cars a day rollin' through, and half of 'em comin' to yuh with grief of
some kind--"
"It's darn little I know about any car but a Ford," Casey admitted
plaintively. "When yuh come to them complicated ones that you can crawl
behind the wheel and set your boot on a button and holler giddap and
she'll start off in a lope, I don't know about it. A Ford's like a mule or
a burro. You take a monkey wrench and work 'em over, and cuss, and that's
about all there is to it. But you take them others, and I got to admit I
don't know."
"Well," said Bill, and spat reflectively, "you roll up your sleeves and
I'll learn yuh. It'll take time for the stuff to be delivered, and you can
learn a lot in two or three weeks, Casey, if you fergit that prospectin'
idea and put your mind to it."
Casey rolled a cigarette and smoked half of it, his eyes clinging
pensively to the barren hills behind Lund. He hunched his shoulders,
looked at Bill and grinned reluctantly.
"She's a go with me, Bill, if you can't think of no other way to spend
money. I wisht you took to poker more, or minin', or something that's got
action. Stakin' Casey Ryan to a garage business looks kinda foolish to me.
But if you can stand it, Bill, I can. It's kinda hard on the tourists,
don't yuh think?"
Thus are garages born,--too many of them, as suffering drivers will
testify. Casey Ryan, known wherever men of the open travel and spin their
yarns, famous for his recklessly efficient driving of lurching
stagecoaches in the old days, and for his soft heart and his
happy-go-lucky ways; famous too as the man who invented ungodly
predicaments from which he could extricate himself and be pleased if he
kept his shirt on his back; Casey Ryan as the owner of a garage might
justly be considered a joke pushed to the very limit of plausibility. Yet
Casey Ryan became just that after two weeks of cramming on mechanics and
the compiling of a reference book which would have made a fortune for
himself and Bill if they had thought to publish it.
"A quort of oil becomes lubrecant and is worth from five to fifteen cents
more per quort when you put it into a two-thousand dollar car or over,"
was one valuable bit of information supplied by Bill. Also: "Never cuss or
fight a man getting work done in your place. Shut up and charge him
according to the way he acts."
It is safe to assume that Bill would make a fortune in the garage business
anywhere, given normal traffic.
Patmos consists of a water tank on the railroad, a siding where trains can
pass each other, a ten-by-ten depot, telegraph office and express and
freight office, six sweltering families, one sunbaked lodging place with
tent bedrooms so hot that even the soap melts, and the Casey Ryan garage.
I forgot to mention three trees which stand beside the water tank and try
to grow enough at night to make up for the blistering they get during the
day. The highway (Coast to Coast and signed at every crossroads in red
letters on white metal boards with red arrows pointing to the far skyline)
shies away from the railroad at Patmos so that perspiring travelers look
wistfully across two hundred yards or so of lava rock and sand and wish
that they might lie under those three trees and cool off. They couldn't,
you know. It is no cooler under the trees than elsewhere. It merely looks
cooler.
Even the water tank is a disappointment to the uninitiated. You cannot
drink the water which the pump draws wheezingly up from some deep
reservoir of bad flavors. It is very clear water and it has a sparkle that
lures the unwary, but it is common knowledge that no man ever drank two
swallows of it if he could help himself. So the water supply of Patmos
lies twelve miles away in the edge of the hills, where there is a very
good spring. One of the six male residents of Patmos hauls water in
barrels, at fifty cents a barrel. He makes a living at it, too.
One other male resident keeps the lodging place,--I avoid the term lodging
house, because this place is not a house. It is a shack with a sign
straddling out over the hot porch to insult the credulity of the
passers-by. The sign says that this place is "The Oasis,"--and the nearest
trees a long rifleshot away, and the coolest water going warm into parched
mouths!
The Oasis stands over by the highway, alongside Casey's garage, and the
proprietor spends nine tenths of his waking hours sitting on the front
porch and following the strip of shade from the west end to the east end,
and in watching the trains go by, and counting the cars of tourists and
remarking upon the State license plate.
"There's an outfit from Ioway, maw," he will call in to his wife. "Wonder
where they're headed fer?" His wife will come to the door and look
apathetically at the receding dust cloud, and go back somewhere,--perhaps
to put fresh soap in the tents to melt. Toward evening the cars are very
likely to slow down and stop reluctantly; sunburned, goggled women and men
looking the place over without enthusiasm. It isn't much of a place, to be
sure, but any place is better than none in the desert, unless you have
your own bed and frying pan with you, roped in dusty canvas to the back of
your car.
Alongside the Oasis stands the garage, and in the garage swelters Casey,--
during this episode. Just at first Bill came down from Lund and helped him
to arrange and mark prices on his stock of tires and "parts" and
accessories, and to remember the catalogue names for things so that he
would recognize them when a car owner asked for them.
Casey, I must explain, had evolved a system of his own while driving his
Ford wickedly here and there to the consternation of his fellow men.
Whatever was not a hootin'-annie was a dingbat, and treated accordingly.
The hootin'-annie appeared to be the thing that went wrong, while the
dingbat was the thing the hootin'-annie was attached to. It was perfectly
simple, to Casey and his Ford, but Bill thought it was a trifle limited
and was apt to confuse customers. So Bill remained three days mopping his
face with his handkerchief and explaining things to Casey. After that
Casey hired a heavy-eyed young Mexican to pump tires and fill radiators
and the like, and settled down to make his fortune.