Cars came and cars went, in heat and dust and some tribulation. In a month
Casey had seen the color of every State license plate in the Union, and
some from Canada and Mexico. From Needles way they came, searching their
souls for words to tell Casey what they thought of it as far as they had
gone. And Casey would squint up at them from under the rim of his greasy
old Stetson and grin his Irish grin.
"Cheer up, the worst is yet to come," he would chant, with never a qualm
at the staleness of the slogan. "How yuh fixed for water? Better fill up
your canteens--yuh don't wanta git caught out between here and Ludlow with
a boilin' radiator and not water enough. Got oil enough? Juan, you look
and see. Can't afford to run low on oil, stranger. No, ma'am, there ain't
any other road--and if there was another road it'd be worse than what this
one is. No, ma'am, you ain't liable to git off'n the road. You can't.
You'd git stuck in the sand 'fore you'd went the length of your car."
He would walk around them and look at their tires, his hands on his hips
perhaps and his mouth damped shut in deep cogitation.
"What kinda shape is your extras in?" he would presently inquire. "She's a
tough one, from here on to the next stop. You got a hind tire here that
ain't goin' to last yuh five miles up the road." He would kick the tire
whose character he was blackening. "Better lay in a supply of blow-out
patches, unless you're a mind to invest in a new casing." Very often he
would sell a tire or two, complete with new tubes, before the car moved
on.
Casey never did things halfway, and Bill had impressed certain things deep
on his mind. He was working with Bill's money and he obeyed Bill's
commands. He never took a check or a promise for his pay, and he never
once let his Irish temper get beyond his teeth or his blackened finger
tips. Which is doing remarkably well for Casey Ryan, as you would admit if
you knew him.
At the last moment, when the driver was settling himself behind the wheel,
Casey would square his conscience for whatever strain the demands of
business had put upon it. "Wait and take a good drink uh cold water before
yuh start out," he would say, and disappear. He knew that the car would
wait. The man or woman never lived who refused a drink of cold water on
the desert in summer. Casey would return with a pale green glass water
pitcher and a pale green glass. He would grin at their exclamations, and
pour for them water that was actually cold and came from the coolest water
bag inside. Those of you who have never traveled across the desert will
not really understand the effect this would have. Those who have will know
exactly what was said of Casey as that car moved out once more into the
glaring sun and the hot wind and the choking dust.
Casey always kept one cold water bag and one in process of cooling, and he
would charge as much as he thought they would pay and be called a fine
fellow afterwards. He knew that. He had lived in dry, hot places before,
and he was conscientiously trying to please the public and also make money
for Bill, who had befriended him. You are not to jump to the conclusion,
however, that Casey systematically robbed the public. He did not. He aided
the public, helped the public across a rather bad stretch of country, and
saw to it that the public paid for the assistance.
Casey saw all sorts and sizes of cars pass to and fro, and most of them
stopped at his door, for gas or for water or oil, or perhaps merely to
inquire inanely if they were on the right road to Needles or to Los
Angeles, as the case might be. Any fool, thought Casey, would know without
asking, since there was no other road, and since the one road was signed
conscientiously every mile or two. But he always grinned good-naturedly
and told them what they wanted him to tell them, and if they shifted money
into his palm for any reason whatever he brought out his green glass
pitcher and his green glass tumbler and gave them a drink all around and
wished them luck.
There were strip-down Fords that tried to look like sixes, and there were
six-cylinder cars that labored harder than Fords. There were limousines,
sedans, sport cars,--and they all carried suitcases and canvas rolls and
bundles draped over the hoods, on the fenders and piled high on the
running boards.
Sometimes he would find it necessary to remove a thousand pounds or so of
ill-wrapped bedding from the back of a tonneau before he could get at the
gas tank to fill it, but Casey never grumbled. He merely retied the
luggage with a packer's hitch that would take the greenhorn through his
whole vocabulary before he untied it that night, and he would add two bits
to the price of the gas because his time belonged to Bill, and Bill
expected Casey's time to be paid for by the public.
One day when it was so hot that even Casey was limp and pale from the
heat, and the proprietor of the Oasis had forsaken the strip of shade on
his porch and had chased his dog out of the dirt hollow it had scratched
under the house and had crawled under there himself, a party pulled slowly
up to the garage and stopped. Casey was inside sitting on the ground and
letting the most recently filled water bag drip down the back of his neck.
He shouted to Juan, but Juan had gone somewhere to find himself a cool
spot for his siesta, so Casey got slowly to his feet and went out to meet
Trouble, sopping his wet hair against the back of his head with the flat
of his hand before he put on his hat. He squinted into the sunshine and
straightway squared himself for business.
This was a two-ton truck fitted for camping. A tall, lean man whose
overalls hung wide from his suspenders and did not seem to touch his
person anywhere, climbed out and stood looking at the bare rims of two
wheels, as if he had at that moment discovered them.
"Thinkin' about the price uh tires, stranger?" Casey grinned cheerfully.
"It's lucky I got your size, at that. Fabrics and cords--and the
difference in price is more'n made up in wear. Run yer car inside outa the
sun whilst I change yer grief into joy."
"I teen havin' hard luck all along," the man complained listlessly.
"Geewhillikens, but it shore does cost to travel!"
Casey should have been warned by that. Bill would have smelled a purse
lean as the man himself and would have shied a little. But Casey could
meet Trouble every morning after breakfast and yet fail to recognize her
until she had him by the collar.
"You ask anybody if it don't!" he agreed sympathetically, mentally going
over his rack of tires, not quite sure that he had four in that size, but
hoping that he had five and that he could persuade the man to invest. He
surely needed rubber, thought Casey, as he scrutinized the two casings on
the car. He stood aside while the man backed, turned a wide half-circle
and drove into the grateful shade of the garage. It seemed cool in there
after the blistering sunlight, unless one glanced at Casey's thermometer
which declared a hundred and nineteen with its inexorable red line.
"Whatcha got there? Goats?" Casey's eyes had left the wheels of the trucks
and dwelt upon a trailer penned round and filled with uneasy animals.
"Yeah. Twelve, not countin' the little fellers. And m'wife an' six young
ones all told. Makes quite a drag on the ole boat. Knocks thunder outa
tires, too. You say you got my size? We-ell, I guess I got to have 'em,
cost er no cost."
"Sure you got to have 'em. It's worse ahead than what you been over, an'
if I was you I'd shoe 'er all round before I hit that lava stretch up
ahead here. You could keep them two fer extras in case of accident. Might
git some wear outa them when yuh strike good roads again, but they shore
won't go far in these rocks. You ask anybody."
"We-ell--I guess mebby I better--I don't see how I'm goin' to git along
any other way, but--"
Casey had gone to find where Juan had cached himself and to pluck that
apathetic youth from slumber and set him to work. Four casings and tubes
for a two-ton truck run into money, as Casey was telling himself
complacently. He had not yet sold any tires for a two-ton truck, and he
had just two fabrics and two cords, in trade vernacular. He paid no
further attention to the man, since there would be no bickering. When a
man has only two badly chewed tires, and four wheels, argument is
superfluous.
So Casey mildly kicked Juan awake and after the garage jack, and himself
wheeled out his four great pneumatic tires, and with his jackknife slit
the wound paper covering, and wondered what it was that smelled so
unpleasant. A goat bleated plaintively to remind him of their presence.
Another goat carried on the theme, and the chorus swelled quaveringly and
held to certain minor notes. Within the closed truck a small child
whimpered and then began to cry definitely at the top of its voice.
Casey looked up from bending over the fourth tire wrapping. "Better let
your folks git out and rest awhile," he invited hospitably. "It's goin' to
take a little time to put these tires on. I got some cold water back
there--help yourself."
"Well, I'd kinda like to water them goats," the man observed diffidently.
"They ain't had a drop sence early yest-day mornin'. You got water here,
ain't yuh? An' they might graze around a mite whilst we're here. Travelin'
like this, I try to kinda give 'em a chanct when we stop along the road.
It's been an awful trip. We come clear from Wyoming. How far is it from
here to San Jose, Californy?"
Casey had in the first week learned that it is not wise for a garage man
to confess that he does not know distances. People always asked him how
far it was to some place of which he had never heard, and he had learned
to name figures at random very convincingly. He named now what seemed to
him a sufficient number, and the man said "Gosh!" and went back to let
down the end gate of the trailer and release the goats. "You said you got
water for 'em?" he asked, his tone putting the question in the form of
both statement and request.
When you are selling four thirty-six-sixes, two of them cords, to a man,
you can't be stingy with a barrel of water, even if it does cost fifty
cents. Casey told Juan to go borrow a tub next door and show the man where
the water barrel stood. Juan, squatted on his heels while he languidly
pumped the jack handle up and down, and seeming pleased than otherwise
when the jack slipped and tilted so that he must lower it and begin all
over again, got languidly to his bare feet and lounged off obediently.
According to Juan's simple philosophy, to obey was better than to dodge
hammers, pliers or monkey wrenches, since Casey's aim was direct and there
was usually considerable force of hard, prospector's muscle behind it.
Juan was gone a long while, long enough to walk slowly to the station of
Patmos and back again, but he returned with the tub, and the incessant
bleating of the goats stilled intermittently while they drank. By this
time Casey had forgotten the goats, even with the noise of them filling
his ears.
Casey was down on his knees hammering dents out of the rim of a front
wheel so that the new tire could go on. Four of the six offspring crowded
around him, getting in the way of Casey's hammer and asking questions
which no man could answer and remain normal. Casey had, while he unwrapped
the casings, made a mental reduction in the price. Even Bill would throw
off a little, he told himself, on a sale like this. Mentally he had
deducted twenty-five dollars from the grand total, but before he had that
rim straightened he said to himself that he'd be darned if he discounted
more than twenty.
"Humbolt an' Greeley, you git away from there an' git out here an' git
these goats a-grazin'," the lean customer called sharply from the rear of
the garage. Humbolt and Greeley hastily proceeded to git, which left two
unkempt young girls standing there at Casey's elbow so that he could not
expectorate where he pleased, or swear at all. Wherefore Casey was
appreciably handicapped in his work, and he wished that he were away out
in the hills digging into the side of a gulch somewhere, sun-blistered,
broke, more than half starving on short rations and with rheumatism in his
right shoulder and a bunion giving him a limp in the left foot. He could
still be happy--
"_What_ yuh doin' that for?" the shrillest voice repeated three times
rapidly, with a sniffle now and then by way of punctuation.
"To make little girls ask questions," grunted Casey, glancing around him
for the snub-nosed, double-headed, four-pound hammer which he called
affectionately by the name Maud. The biggest girl had Maud. She had turned
it upright on its handle and was sitting on the head of it. When Casey
reached for it and got it, without apology or warning, the girl sprawled
backward and howled.
"Porshea, you git up from there! _Shame_ on yuh!" A shrill woman voice,
very much like the younger voices except that it was worn rough and
querulous with age and many hardships, called down from the truck. Casey
looked up, startled, and tried to remember just what he had said before
the girls appeared to silence him. The woman was very large both in height
and in bulk, and she was heaving herself out of the truck in a way that
reminded Casey oddly of a disgruntled hippopotamus he had once watched
coming out of its tank at a circus. Casey moved modestly away and did not
look, after that first glance. A truck, you will please understand, is not
a touring car, and ladies who have passed the two-hundred-pound notch on
the scales should remain up there and call for a step-ladder.
She descended, and the jack slipped and let the car down with a six-inch
lurch. Casey is remarkably quick in his motions. He turned, jumped three
feet and caught the lady's full weight in his arms as she was falling
toward him. Probably he would have caught it anyway, but then there would
have been little left of Casey, and his troubles would have been finished
instead of being just begun.
He had just straightened the jack and was beginning to lift the bare wheel
off the ground again when the fifth offspring descended. Casey thought
again of the hippopotamus in its infancy. The fifth was perhaps fifteen,
but she had apparently reached her full growth, which was very nearly that
of her mother. She had also reached the age of self-consciousness, and she
simpered at Casey when he assisted her to alight.
Casey was not bashful, nor was he over-fastidious; men who have lived long
in the wilderness are not, as a rule. Still, he had his little whims, and
he failed to react to the young lady's smile. His pale blue eyes were keen
to observe details and even Casey did not approve of "high-water marks" on
feminine beauty.
Well, that brought the whole family to view save the youngest who had
evidently dropped asleep and was left in the truck. Casey went to work on
the wheel again, after directing mother and daughter to the desert water
bag which swung suspended from ropes in the rear of the garage.
Ten minutes later a dusty limousine stopped for gas and oil, and Casey
left his work to wait upon them. There was a very good-looking girl
driving, and the man beside her was undoubtedly only her father, and Casey
was humanly anxious to be remembered pleasantly when they drove on. He
asked them to wait and have a drink of cold water, and was deeply
humiliated to find that both water bags were empty,--the overgrown girl
having used the last to wash her face. Casey didn't like her any the
better for that, or for having accentuated the high-water mark, or for
forcing him to apologize to the pretty driver of the limousine.
He refilled the water bags and remarked pointedly that it would take an
hour for the water to cool in them and that they must be left alone in the
meantime. He did not look at the girl, but from the tail of his eye he saw
her pull a contemptuous grimace at him when she thought his back safely
turned.
Wherefore Casey finished the putting on of the fourth tire pretty well up
toward the boiling point in temper and in blood. I have not mentioned half
the disagreeable trifles that nagged at him during the interval,--his
audience, for instance, that hovered so close that he could not get up
without colliding with one of them, so full of aimless talk that he
mislaid tools in his distraction. Juan was a pest and Casey thought
malevolently how he would kill him when the job was finished. Juan went
around like one in a trance, his heavy-lidded, opaque eyes following every
movement of the girl, which kept her younger sisters giggling. But even
with interruptions and practically no assistance the truck stood at last
with four good tires on its wheels, and Casey wiped a perspiring face and
let down the jack, thankful that the job was done; thinking, too, that ten
dollars would be a big reduction on the price. He had to count his time,
you see.
"Well, how much does it come to, mister?" the lord of the flock asked
dolefully, when Casey called him in and told him that he could go at any
time now.
Casey told him, and made the price only five dollars lower than the full
amount, just because he hated to see men walk around loose in their pants,
with their stomachs sagged in as though they never were fed a square meal
in their lives.
"It's a pile uh money to pay out for rubber that's goin' to be chewed off
on these here danged rocks," sighed the man.
Casey grunted and began collecting his tools, rescuing the best hammer he
had from one of the girls. "I wisht it was all profit," he said. "Or even
a quarter of it. I'm sellin' 'em close as I can an' git paid fer my time
puttin' 'em on."
"Oh, I ain't kickin' about the price. I'm satisfied with that." Men
usually are, you notice, when they want credit. "Now I tell yuh. I ain't
got that much money with me--"
Casey spat and pointed his thumb toward a sign which he had nailed up just
the day before, thinking that it would save both himself and his customers
some embarrassment. The sign, except that the letters were not even, was
like this:
"CHECKS MUST BE CASHED
BY THE ONER
OR THEY AIN'T CASHED"
The lean man read and looked at Casey humbly. "Well, I ain't never wrote a
check in my life. Now I tell yuh. I ain't got the money to pay for these
tires, but I tell yuh what I'll do; I'm goin' on up to my brother--he's
got a prune orchard a little ways out from San Jose, an' he's well fixed.
Now I'll write out an order on my brother, fer him to send you the money.
He's good fer it, an' he'll do it. I'm goin' on up to help him work his
place on shares, so I c'n straighten up with him when I get--"
Casey had picked up the jack again and was regretfully but firmly
adjusting it under the front axle. "That ain't the first good prospect I
ever had pinch out on me," he observed, trying to be cheerful over it. He
could even grin while he squinted up at the lean man.
"Well, now, you can't hardly refuse to trust a man in my fix!"
"Think I can't?" Casey was working the jack handle rapidly and the words
came in jerks. "You stand there and watch me." He spun the wheel free and
reached for his socket wrench. "I wisht you'd spoke your piece before I
set these dam nuts so tight," he added.
The lean man turned and looked inquiringly at his wife. "Ain't I honest,
maw, and don't I pay my debts? An' ain't my brother Joe honest, an' don't
he pay _his_ debts? Would you think the man lived, maw, that would set a
man with a fambly afoot out on the desert like this?"
"Nev' mind, now, paw. Give him time to think what it means, an' he won't.
He's got a heart."
The baby awoke and cried then, and Casey's heart squirmed in his chest.
But he thought of Bill and stiffened his business nerve.
"I got a heart; sure I've got a heart. You ask anybody if Casey's got a
heart. But I also got a pardner."
"Your pardner's likely gen'l'man enough to trust us, if you ain't," maw
said sharply.
"Yes, ma'am, he is. But he's got these tires to pay fer on the first of
the month. It ain't a case uh not trustin'; it's a case of git the money
or keep the tires. I wisht you had the money--she shore is a good bunch uh
rubber I let yuh try on."
They wrangled with him while he removed the tires he had so painstakingly
adjusted, but Casey was firm. He had to be. There is no heart in the
rubber trust; merely a business office that employs very efficient
bookkeepers, who are paid to see that others pay. He removed the new
tires; that was his duty to Bill. By then it was five o'clock when all
good mechanics throw down their pliers and begin to shed their coveralls.
Casey was his own man after five o'clock. He rolled the tattered tires out
into the sunlight, let out the air and yanked them from their rims. "Come
on here and help, and I'll patch up your old tires so you c'n go on," he
offered good-naturedly, in spite of the things the woman had said to him.
"The tire don't live that Casey can't patch if it comes to a showdown."
Before he was through with them he had donated four blow-out patches to
the cause, and about five hours of hard labor. The Smith family--yes, they
were of the tribe of Smith--were camped outside and quarreling
incessantly. The goats, held in spasmodic restraint by Humbolt and Greeley
and a little spotted dog which Casey had overlooked in his first
inventory, were blatting inconsequently in the sage behind the garage.
Casey cooked a belated supper and hoped that the outfit would get an early
start, and that their tires would hold until they reached Ludlow, at
least. "Though I ain't got nothin' against Ludlow," he added to himself
while he poured his coffee.
"Maw wants to know if you got any coffee you kin lend," the shrill voice
of Portia sounded unexpectedly at his elbow. Casey jumped,--an indication
that his nerves had been unstrung.
"Lend? Hunh! Tell 'er I give her a cupful." Then, because Casey had
streaks of wisdom, he closed the doors of the garage and locked them from
the inside. Cars might come and honk as long as they liked; Casey was
going to have his sleep.
Very early he was awakened by the bleating, the barking, the crying and
the wrangling of the Smiths. He pulled his tarp over his ears, hot as it
was, to shut out the sound. After a long while he heard the stutter of the
truck motor getting warmed up. There was a clamor of voices, a bleating of
goats, the barking of the spotted dog, and the truck moved off.
"Thank Gawd!" muttered Casey, and went to sleep again.