"Look there!" Casey rose from the ground where he had been sitting with
his hands clasped round his drawn-up knees. He pointed with his pipe to a
mountain side twelve miles away but looking five, even in the gloom of
early dusk. "Look at that, will yuh! Whadda yuh say that is, just makin' a
guess? A fire, mebby?"
"Camp fire. Some prospector boiling coffee in a dirty lard bucket, maybe."
Casey snorted. "It's a darn big fire to boil a pot uh coffee! Recollect,
it's twelve miles over to that mountain. A bonfire a mile off wouldn't
look any bigger than that. Would it now?" His tone was a challenge to my
truthfulness.
"Wel-l, I guess it wouldn't, come to think of it."
"Guess? You know darn well it wouldn't. You watch that there fire. I ain't
over there--but if that ain't the devil's lantern, I'll walk on my hands
from here over there an' find out for yuh."
"I'd have to go over there myself to discover whether you're right or
wrong. But if a fellow can trust his eyes, Casey--"
"Well, you can't," Casey said grimly, still standing, his eyes fixed upon
the distant light. "Not here in this country, you can't. You ask anybody.
You don't trust your eyes when yuh come to a dry lake an' you see water,
an' the bushes around the shore reflected in the water, an' mebby a boat
out in the middle. _Do_ yuh? You don't trust your eyes when you look at
them hills. They look close enough to walk over to 'em in half or three
quarters of an hour. _Don't_ they? An' didn't I take yuh in my Ford
auto-_mo_-bile, an' wasn't it twelve? An' d'yuh trust your eyes when yuh
look up, an' it looks like you could knock stars down with a tent pole,
like yuh knock apples off'n trees? Sure, you can't trust your eyes! When
yuh hit the desert, oletimer, yuh pack two of the biggest liars on earth
right under your eyebrows." He chuckled at that. "An' most folks pack
another one under their noses, fer luck. Now lookit over there! Prospector
nothin'. It's the devil out walkin' an' packin' a lantern. He's mebby
found some shin bones an' a rib or two an' mebby a chewed boot, an' he
stopped there to have his little laugh. Lemme tell yuh. You mark where
that fire is. An' t'-morra, if yuh like, I'll take yuh over there. If you
c'n find a track er embers on that slope--Gawsh!"
We both stood staring; while he talked, the light had blinked out like
snapping an electric switch. And that was strange because camp fires take
a little time in the dying. I stepped inside the tent, fumbled for the
field glasses and came out, adjusting the night focus. Casey's squat,
powerful form stood perfectly still where I had left him, his face turned
toward the mountain. There was no fire on the slope. Beyond, hanging black
in the sky, a thunder cloud pillowed up toward the peak of the mountain,
pushing out now and then to blot a star from the purple. Now and then a
white, ragged gash cut through, but no sound reached up to where we were
camped on the high mesa that was the lap of Starvation Mountain. I will
explain that Casey had come back to Starvation to see if there were not
another good silver claim lying loose and needing a location monument. We
faced Tippipah Range twelve miles away,--and to-night the fire on its
slope.
"Lightning struck a yucca over there and burned it, probably," I hazarded,
seeking the spot through the glasses.
"Yeah--only there ain't no yuccas on that slope. That's a limestone ledge
formation an' there ain't enough soil to cover up a t'rantler. And the
storm's over back of the Tippipahs anyhow. It ain't on 'em."
"It's burning up again--"
"Hit another yucca, mebby!"
"It looks--" I adjusted the lenses carefully "--like a fire, all right.
There's a reddish cast. I can't see any flames, exactly, but--" I suppose
I gave a gasp, for Casey laughed outright.
"No, I guess yuh can't. Flames don't travel like that--huh?"
The light had moved suddenly, so that it seemed to jump clean away from
the field of vision embraced by the glasses. I had a little trouble in
picking it up again. I had to take down the glasses and look; and then I
left them down and watched the light with my naked, lying eyes. They did
lie; they must have. They said that a camp fire had abruptly picked itself
up bodily and was slipping rapidly as a speeding automobile up a bare
white slide of rock so steep that a mountain goat would give one glance
and hunt up an easier trail. All my life I have had intimate acquaintance
with camp fires; I have eaten with them, slept with them, coaxed them in
storm, watched them from afar. I thought I knew all their tricks, all
their treacheries. I have seen apparently cold ashes blow red quite
unexpectedly and fire grass and bushes and go racing away,--I have fought
them then with whatever came to hand.
I admit that an odd, prickly sensation at the base of my scalp annoyed me
while I watched this fire race up the slope and leave no red trail behind
it. Then it disappeared, blinked out again. I opened my mouth to call
Casey's attention to it--though I felt that he was watching it with that
steady, squinting stare of his that never seems to wink or waver for a
second--but there it was again, come to a stop just under the crest of the
mountain where the white slide was topped by a black rim capped with
bleak, bare rock like a crude skullcap on Tippipah. The fire flared,
dimmed, burned bright again, as though some one had piled on dry brush. I
caught up the glasses and watched the light for a full minute. They were
good glasses,--I ought to have seen the flicker of flames; but I did not.
Just the reddish yellow glow and no more.
"Must be fox fire," I said, feeling impatient because that did not satisfy
me at all, but having no other explanation that I could think of handy.
"I've seen wonderful exhibitions of it in low, swampy ground--"
Casey spat into the dark. "I never heard of nobody boggin' down, up there
on Tippipah." He put his cold pipe in his mouth, removed it and gestured
with it toward the light. "I've seen jack-o'-lanterns myself. You know
darn well that ain't it; not up on them rocks, dry as a bone. A minute ago
you said it was lightnin' burnin' a yucca. Why don't yuh come out in the
open, an' say you don't _know_? Mebby you'll come closer to believin' what
I told yuh about that devil's lantern I follered. He's lit another one--
kinda hopin' we'll be fool enough to fall for it. You come inside where
yuh can't watch it. That's what does the damage--watchin' and wonderin'
and then goin' to see. I bet you wanta strike out right now and see just
what it is."
I didn't admit it, but Casey had guessed exactly what was in my mind. I
was itching with curiosity and trying to ignore the creepiness of it.
Casey went into the tent and lighted the candle and proceeded to unlace
his high hiking boots. "You come on in and go to bed. Don't yuh pay no
attention to that light--that's what the Old Boy plays for first, every
time; workin' your curiosity up. You ask anybody. He played me fer a
sucker and I told yuh about it, and yuh thought Casey was stringin' yuh.
Well, I can take a joke from the devil himself and never let out a yip--
but once is enough for Casey! I'm goin' to bed. Let him set out there and
hold his darn lantern and be damned; he ain't going to make nothin' off'n
Casey Ryan this time. You can ask anybody if Casey Ryan bites twice on the
same hook."
He got into bed and turned his face to the wall with a finality I could
not ignore. I let it go at that, but twice I got up and went outside to
look. There burned the light, diabolically like a signal fire on the peak,
where no fire should be. I began to seek explanations, but the best of
them were vague. Electricity playing a prank of some obscure kind,--that
was as close as I could get to it, and even that did not satisfy as it
should have done, perhaps because the high, barren mesas and the mountains
of bare rocks are in themselves weird and sinister, and commonplace
explanations of their phenomena seem out of place.
The land is empty of men, emptier still of habitations. There are not many
animals, even. A few coyotes, all of them under suspicion of having
rabies; venomous things such as tarantulas and centipedes, scorpions,
rattlers, hydrophobia skunks. Not so many of them that they are a constant
menace, but occasionally to be reckoned with. Great sprawling dry lakes
ominous in their very placidity; dust dry, with little whirlwinds
scurrying over them and mirages that lie to you most convincingly,
painting water where there is only clay dust. Water that is hidden deep in
forbidding canyons, water that you must hunt for blindly unless you have
been told where it comes stealthily out from some crevice in the rocks.
Indians know the water holes, and have told the white men with whom they
made friends after a fashion--for Casey tells me he never knew a red man
who was essentially noble--and these have told others; and men have named
the springs and have indicated their location on maps. Otherwise the land
is dry, parched and deadly and beautiful, and men have died terrible,
picturesque deaths within its borders.
I was thinking of that, and it seemed not too incongruous that the devil
should now and then walk abroad with a lantern of his own devising to make
men shrink from his path. But Casey says, and I think he means it, that
the light is a lure. He told me a weird adventure of his own to back his
argument, but I thought he was inventing most of it as he went along.
Until I saw that light on Tippipah I had determined to let his romancing
go in at one ear if it must, and stop there without running out at the
tips of my fingers. Casey has enough ungodly adventures that are true. I
didn't feel called upon to repeat his Irish inventions.
But now I'm going to tell you. If you can't believe it I shall not blame
you; but Casey swears that it is all true. It's worth beginning where
Casey did, at the beginning. And that goes back to when he was driving
stage in the Yellowstone.
Casey was making the trip out, one time, and he had just one passenger
because it was at the end of the season and there had been a week of nasty
weather that had driven out most of the sightseers and no new ones were
coming in. This man was a peevish, egotistical sort, I imagine; at any
rate he did a lot of talking about himself and his ill luck, and he told
Casey of his misfortunes by the hour.
Casey did not mind that much. He says he didn't listen half the time. But
finally the fellow began talking of the wealth that is wasted on folks who
can't use it properly or even appreciate the good fortune.
To illustrate that point he told a story that set Casey's mind to seeing
visions. The man told about an old Indian who lived in dirt and a
government blanket and drank bad whisky when he could get it, and whipped
his squaw and behaved exactly like other Indians. Yet that old Indian knew
where gold lay so thick that he could pick out pieces of crumbly rock all
plastered with free gold. He was too lazy to dig out enough to do him any
good. He would come into the nearest town with a rusty old lard bucket
full of high grade so rich that the storekeeper once got five hundred
dollars from the bucketful. He gave the Indian about twenty dollars' worth
of grub and made him a present of two yards of bright blue ribbon, which
tickled the old buck so much that in two weeks he was back with more high
grade knotted in the bottom of a gunny sack.
Casey asked the man why some one didn't trail the Injun. Casey knew that
an Indian is not permitted to file a claim to mineral land. He could not
hold it, under the law, if some white man discovered it and located the
ground, but Casey thought that some white-hearted fellow might take the
claim and pay the buck a certain percentage of the profits.
The man said that couldn't be done. The old buck--Injun Jim, they called
him--was an old she-bear. All the Indians were afraid of him and would
hide their faces in their blankets when he passed them on his way to the
gold, rather than be suspected by Injun Jim of any unwarranted interest in
his destination. Casey knew enough about Indians to accept that statement.
And white men, it would seem, were either not nervy enough or else they
were not cunning enough. A few had attempted to trail Injun Jim, but no
one had ever succeeded, because that part of Nevada had not had any gold
stampede, which the man declared would have come sure as fate if Injun
Jim's mine were ever uncovered.
Casey asked certain questions and learned all that the man could tell
him,--or would tell him. He said that Injun Jim lived mostly in the
Tippipah district. No free gold had ever been discovered there, nor much
gold of any kind; but Injun Jim certainly brought free gold into Round
Butte whenever he wanted grub. It must have been ungodly rich,--five
hundred dollars' worth in a ten-pound lard bucket!
The tale held Casey's imagination. He dreamed nights of trailing Injun
Jim, and if he'd had any money to outfit for the venture he surely would
have gone straight to Nevada and to Round Butte. He told himself that it
would take an outsider to furnish the energy for the search. Men who live
in a country are the last to see the possibilities lying all around them,
Casey said. It was true; he had seen it work out even in himself. Hadn't
he driven stage in Cripple Creek country and carried out gold by the
hundred-thousand,--gold that might have been his had he not been content
to drive stage? Hadn't he lived in gold country all his life, almost, and
didn't he know mineral formations as well as many a school--trained
expert?
But even dreams of gold fluctuate and grow vague before the small
interests of everyday living. Casey hadn't the money just then to quit his
job of stage driving and go Indian stalking. It would take money,--a few
hundred at least. Casey at that time lacked the price of a ticket to Round
Butte. So he had to drive and dream, and his first spurt of saving grew
half--hearted as the weeks passed; and then he lost all he had saved in a
poker game because he wanted to win enough in one night to make the trip.
However, he went among men with his ears wide open for gossip concerning
Injun Jim, and he gleaned bits of information that seemed to confirm what
his passenger up in the Yellowstone had told him. He even met a man who
knew Injun Jim.
Injun Jim, he was told, had one eye and a bad temper. He had lost his
right eye in a fight with soldiers, in the days when Indian fighting was
part of a soldier's training. Injun Jim nursed a grudge against the whites
because of that eye, and while he behaved himself nowadays, being old and
not very popular amongst his own people, it was taken for granted that his
trigger finger would never be paralyzed, and that a white man need only
furnish him a thin excuse and a fair chance to cover all traces of the
killing. Injun Jim would attend to the rest with great zeal.
Stranger still, Casey found that the tale of the lard bucket and the gold
was true. This man had once been in the store when Jim arrived for grub.
He had taken a piece of the ore in his hands. It was free gold, all right,
and it must have come from a district where free gold was scarce as women.
"We've got it figured down to a spot about fifty miles square," the man
told Casey. "That old Injun don't travel long trails. He's old. And all
Injuns are lazy. They won't go hunting mineral like a white man. They know
mineral when they see it and they have good memories and can go to the
spot afterwards. Injun Jim prob-ly run across a pocket somewheres when he
was hunting. Can't be much of it--he'd bring in more at a time if there
was, and be Injun-rich. He's just figurin' on making it hold out long as
he lives. 'Tain't worth while trying to find it; there's too much mineral
laying around loose in these hills."
Casey stored all that gossip away in the back of his head and through all
the ups and downs of the years he never quite forgot it.