A year before this story opens the town of Ranger, Texas, consisted of
a weatherbeaten, run-down railroad station, a blacksmith shop, and a
hitching rail, town enough, incidentally, for the limited number of
people and the scanty amount of merchandise that passed through it.
Ranger lay in the dry belt--considered an almost entirely useless part
of the state--where killing droughts were not uncommon, and where for
months on end the low, flinty hills radiate heat like the rolls of a
steel mill. In such times even the steep, tortuous canyons dried out
and there was neither shade nor moisture in them. The few farms and
ranches round about were scattered widely, and life thereon was a grim
struggle against heartbreak, by reason of the gaunt, gray, ever-present
specter of the drought. Of late this particular region had proven
itself to be one of violent extremes, of extreme dryness during which
flowers failed to bloom, the grass shriveled and died, and even the
trees refused to put forth leaves; or, more rarely, of extreme wetness,
when the country was drowned beneath torrential rains. Sometimes,
during unusual winters, the heavens opened and spilled themselves,
choking the narrow watercourses, washing out roads and destroying
fields, changing the arid arroyos into raging river beds. At such times
life for the country people was scarcely less burdensome than during
the droughts, for the heavy bottom lands became quagmires, and the clay
of the higher levels turned into putty or a devilish agglutinous
substance that rendered travel for man or beast or vehicle almost
impossible.
There appeared to be no law of average here. In dry times it was a
desert, lacking wholly, however, in the beauty, the mystery, and the
spell of a desert; in wet times it was a gehenna of mud and slush and
stickiness, and entirely minus that beauty and freshness that attends
the rainy seasons in a tropic clime. It was a land peopled by a
hard-bitten race of nesters--come from God knows where and for God
knows why--starved in mind and body, slaves of a hideous environment
from which they lacked means of escape.
Geologists had claimed for some time that there must be coal in these
north Texas counties, a contention perhaps based upon a comfortable
belief in the law of compensation, upon a theory that a region so poor
aboveground must of necessity contain values of some sort beneath the
surface. But as for other natural resources, they scouted the belief in
such. Other parts of the state yielded oil, for instance, but here the
formation was all wrong. Who ever heard of oil in hard lime?
Nevertheless, petroleum was discovered, and among the fraternity that
dealt in it Ranger became a word of contradiction and of deep meaning.
Aladdin rubbed his lamp, and, lo! a magic transformation occurred; one
of those thrilling dramas of a dramatic industry was played. A gypsy
camp sprang up beside the blacksmith shop, and as the weeks fled by it
changed into a village of wooden houses, then into a town, and soon
into a city of brick and iron and concrete. The railroad became clogged
with freight, a tidal wave of men broke over the town. Wagons, giant
motor trucks, caterpillar tractors towing long strings of trailers,
lurched and groaned and creaked over the hills, following roads unfit
for a horse and buggy. Straddling derricks reared themselves
everywhere; their feet were set in garden patches, in plowed fields, in
lonely mesquite pastures, and even high up on the crests of stony
ridges. One day their timbers were raw and clean, the next day they
were black and greasy, advertising the fact that once again the heavy
rock pressure far below had sent another fountain of fortune spraying
over the top. Then pipe lines were laid and unsightly tank farms were
built.
Ranger became a mobilization point, a vast concentration camp for
supplies, and amid its feverish activity there was no rest, no Sundays
or holidays; the work went on at top tension night and day amid a
clangor of metal, a ceaseless roar of motors, a bedlam of hammers and
saws and riveters. Men lived in greasy clothes, breathing dust and the
odors of burnt gas mainly, eating poor food and drinking warm, fetid
water when they were lucky enough to get any at all.
This was about the state of affairs that Calvin Gray found on the
morning of his arrival. He and Mallow had managed to secure a Pullman
section on the night train from Dallas; the fact that they were forced
to carry their own luggage from the station uptown to the restaurant
where they hoped to get breakfast was characteristic of the place. En
route thither they had to elbow their way through a crowd that filled
the sidewalks as if on a fair day.
Mallow was well acquainted with the town, it appeared, and during
breakfast he maintained a running fire of comment, some of which was
worth listening to.
"Ever hear how the first discovery was made? Well, the T. P. Company
had the whole country plastered with coal leases and finally decided to
put down a fifteen-hundred-foot wildcat. The guy that ran the rig had a
hunch there was oil here if he went deep enough, but he knew the
company wouldn't stick, so he faked the log of the well as long as he
could, then he kept on drilling, against orders--refused to open his
mail, for fear he'd find he was fired and the job called off. He was a
thousand feet deeper than he'd been ordered to go when--blooie! Over
the top she went with fourteen hundred barrels.... Desdemona's the name
of a camp below here, but they call it Hog Town. More elegant! Down
there the derricks actually straddle one another, and they have to
board them over to keep from drowning one another out when they blow
in. Fellow in Dallas brought in the first well, and it was so big that
his stock went from a hundred dollars a share to twelve thousand. All
in a few weeks. Of course, he started a bank. Funniest people I ever
saw, that way. Usually when a rube makes a winning he gambles or gets
him a woman, but these hicks take their coin and buy banks.... Ranger's
a real town; everything wide open and the law in on the play. That
makes good times. Show me a camp where the gamblers play solitaire and
the women take in washing and I'll show you a dead village. The joints
here have big signs on the wall, '_Gambling Positively Prohibited_,'
and underneath the games are running high, wide, and fancy. Refined
humor, I call it.... There were nine killings one day, but that's above
the average. The last time I was in town a couple of tool dressers got
into a row with a laundryman--claimed they'd been overcharged six
cents. It came to a shooting, and we buried all three of them. Two
cents apiece! That was their closing price. The cost of living is high
enough, but it isn't expensive to die here."
In this vein ran Mallow's talk. From the first he had laid himself out
to be entertaining and helpful, and Gray obligingly permitted him to
have his way. When they had finished breakfast, he even allowed his
companion to hire an automobile and driver for him. They shook hands
finally, the best of friends. Mallow wished him good luck and gravely
voiced the hope that he would have fewer diamonds when he returned.
Gray warmly thanked his companion for his many courtesies and declared
they would soon meet again.
Thus far the trip had worked out much as Gray had expected. Now, as his
service car left the town and joined the dusty procession of vehicles
moving country-ward, he covertly studied its driver and was gratified
to note that the fellow bore all the ear-marks of a thorough scoundrel.
What conversation the man indulged in strengthened that impression.
The Briskow farm, it appeared, lay about twenty miles out, but twenty
miles over oil-field roads proved to be quite a journey. During the
muddy season the driver declared, it might well take a whole day to
make that distance; now that the roads were dry, they could probably
cover it in two or three hours, if the car held together. Traffic near
Ranger was terrific, and how it managed to move, even at a snail's
pace, was a mystery, for to sit a car was like riding a bucking horse.
If there had been the slightest attempts at road building they were now
invisible, and the vehicular streams followed meandering wagon trails
laid down by the original inhabitants of pre-petroleum days, which had
not been bettered by the ceaseless pounding of the past twelve months.
Up and down, over armored ridges and into sandy arroyos, along leaning
hillsides and across 'dobe flats, baked brick hard by the sun, the
current of travel roared and pounded with reckless disregard of tire
and bolt and axle. In the main, it was a motor-driven procession. There
were, to be sure, occasional teams of fine imported draft horses, but
for every head of live stock there were a dozen huge trucks, and for
every truck a score of passenger cars. These last were battered and
gray with mud, and their dusty occupants were of a color to match, for
they drove blindly through an asphyxiating cloud. Even the thirsty
vegetation beside the roads was coated gray, and was so tinder dry that
it seemed as if a lighted match would explode it.
The sun glared cruelly, and the pyramidal piles of iron pipe chained to
the groaning trucks and plunging trailers were hot enough to fry eggs
upon, but neither they nor the steaming radiators gave off more heat
than the soil and the rocks.
Detours were common--testimony to man's inherent optimism--but each was
worse than the other, the roadbeds everywhere were rutted, torn, broken
up as if from long-continued heavy shell fire.
From every ridge skeleton derricks were in sight as far as the eye
could reach, the scattered ones, whose clean timbers gleamed in the
sunlight, testifying to dry holes; the blackened ones, usually in
clumps, indicating "production"--magic word.
There were a few crossroads settlements--"hitch-rail towns"--unpainted
and ramshackle, but nowhere was there an attempt at farming, for this
part of Texas had gone hog wild over oil. Abandoned straw stacks had
settled and molded, cornfields had grown up to weeds, what few head of
cattle still remained lolled near the artificial surface tanks, all but
dried into mud holes.
It was a farm of this character that Gray's driver finally pointed out
as the Briskow ranch. The house, an unsightly story-and-a-half affair,
stood at the back of what had once been a cultivated field, and the
place was distinctive only in the fact that it gave evidence of a good
water well, or a capacious reservoir, in the form of a vivid green
garden patch and a few flourishing peach trees immediately behind the
residence--welcome relief to the eye.
Nobody answered Gray's knock at the front door, so he walked around the
house. Over the garden fence, grown thick with brambles, he beheld two
feminine figures, or rather two faded sunbonnets topping two pairs of
shoulders, and as he drew nearer he saw that one woman was bent and
slow moving, while the other was a huge creature, wide of hip and deep
of bosom, whose bare arms, burnt to a rich golden brown, were like
those of a blacksmith, and who wielded her heavy hoe as if it were a
toy. She was singing in a thin, nasal, uncultivated voice.
Evidently they were the Briskow "help," therefore Gray made his
presence known and inquired for the master or mistress of the place.
The elder woman turned, exposing a shrewd, benevolent face, and after a
moment of appraisal said, "I'm Miz' Briskow."
"Indeed!" The visitor smiled his best and announced the nature of his
errand.
"Lawsy me!" Mrs. Briskow planted her hoe in the soil and turned her
back upon Gray. "Allie! Yore pa has gone an' done it again. Here's
another of his fool notions."
The women regarded each other silently, their facial expressions hidden
beneath their bonnets; then the mother exposed her countenance a second
time, and said, "Mister, this is Allegheny, our girl."
Miss Allegheny Briskow lifted her head, nodded shortly, and stared over
the hoe handle at Gray. Her gaze was one of frank curiosity, and he
returned it in kind, for he had never beheld a creature like her. Gray
was a tall man, but this girl's eyes met his on a level, and her
figure, if anything, was heavier than his. Nor was its appearance
improved by her shapeless garment of faded wash material. Her feet were
incased in a pair of men's cheap "brogans" that Gray could have worn;
drops of perspiration gleamed upon her face, and her hair, what little
was visible beneath the sunbonnet, was wet and untidy. Altogether she
presented a picture such as some painter of peasant types might have
sketched. Garbed appropriately, in shawl and sabots, she would have
passed for some European plowwoman of Amazonian proportions. Allegheny!
It was a suitable name, indeed, for such a mountainous person. Her size
was truly heroic; she would have been grotesque, ridiculous, except for
a certain youthful plasticity and a suggestion of tremendous vigor and
strength that gave her dignity. Her ample, ill-fitting dress failed to
hide the fact that her robust body was well, even splendidly molded.
Gray's attention, however, was particularly challenged by the girl's
face and eyes. It was a handsome countenance, cut in large, bold
features, but of a stony immobility; the eyes were watchful, brooding,
sullen. They regarded him with mingled defiance and shyness for an
instant, then they avoided his; she averted her gaze; she appeared to
be meditating ignominious flight.
The mother abandoned her labor, wiped her hands upon her skirt, and
said, with genuine hospitality: "Come right into the house and rest
yourself. Pa and Buddy'll be home at dinner time." By now a fuller
significance of this stranger's presence had struck home and she
laughed softly as she led the way toward the dwelling. "Di'mon's for
Allie and me, eh? Land sakes! Pa's up to something new every day,
lately. I wonder what next."
As Gray stepped aside for the younger woman to precede him, his
curiosity must have been patent, for Allegheny became even more
self-conscious than before, and her face flamed a fiery red. As yet she
had not spoken.
There were three rooms to the Briskow residence, bedrooms all, with a
semi-detached, ramshackle, whitewashed kitchen at the rear and
separated from the main house by a narrow "gallery." Into the front
chamber, which evidently did service also as a parlor, Mrs. Briskow led
the way. By now she was in quite a flutter of excitement. For the guest
she drew forth the one rocking chair, a patent contraption, the rockers
of which were held upon a sort of track by stout spiral springs. Its
seat and back were of cheap carpet material stretched over a lacquered
frame, and these she hastily dusted with her apron; then she seated
herself upon the edge of the bed and beamed expectantly.
Allegheny had carelessly brushed back her sunbonnet, exposing a mane of
damp, straight, brown hair of a quantity and length to match her
tremendous vigor of limb; but she remained standing at the foot of the
bed, too ill at ease to take a chair or perhaps too agitated to see
one. She was staring straight ahead, her eyes fixed a foot or two over
the caller's head.
Gray ignored her manifest embarrassment, made a gingerly acquaintance
with the chair of honor, and then devoted his attention to the elder
woman. At every move the coiled springs under him strained and snapped
alarmingly.
"We don't often see jewelry peddlers," the mother announced; "but,
sakes alive! things is changin' so fast we get a new surprise most
every day. I s'pose you got those rings in that valise?" She indicated
Gray's stout leather sample case.
"Precisely," said he. "If you have time I'd like to show them to you."
Mrs. Briskow's bent figure stirred, she uttered a throaty chuckle, and
her weary face, lined with the marks of toil and hardship, flushed
faintly. Her misshapen hands tightly clasped themselves and her faded
eyes began to sparkle. Gray felt a warm thrill of compassion at the
agitation of this kindly, worn old soul, and he rose quickly. As he
gained his feet that amazing chair behaved in a manner wholly unusual
and startling; relieved of strain, the springs snapped and whined,
there was a violent oscillation of the back, a shudder convulsed the
thing, and it sprang after him, much as a tame rabbit thumps its feet
upon the ground in an effort to bluff a kitten.
The volunteer salesman spread out his dazzling wares upon the patchwork
counterpane, then stepped back to observe the effect. Ma Briskow's
hands fluttered toward the gems, then reclasped themselves in her lap;
she bent closer and regarded them fixedly. The Juno-like daughter also
stared down at the display with fascination.
After a moment Allegheny spoke, and her speaking voice was in pleasing
contrast to the nasal notes of that interrupted song. "Are them _real_
di'mon's?" she queried, darkly.
"Oh yes! And most of them are of very fine quality."
"Pa never told us a word," breathed the mother. "He's _allus_ up to
some trick."
"Please examine them. I want you to look them all over," Gray urged.
Mrs. Briskow acted upon this invitation only after she had dried her
hands, and then with trepidation. Gingerly, reverently she removed a
ring from its resting place and held it up to the light. "My! Ain't it
sparkly?" she gasped, after an ecstatic pause.
Again the girl spoke, her eyes fixed defiantly upon Gray. "You could
fool us easy, 'cause we never saw _real_ di'mon's. We've allus been too
pore."
The man nodded. "I hope you're not disappointed in them and I hope you
are going to see and to own a great many finer ones.
"We've never seen noth--anything, nor been anywhere, yet." It was Mrs.
Briskow speaking. "But we're goin'. We're goin' lots of places and
we're goin' to see everything wuth seein', so Pa says. Anyhow, the
children is. First off, Pa's goin' to take us to the mountains." The
mother faced the visitor at this announcement and for a moment she
appeared to be gazing at a vision, for her wrinkled countenance was
glorified. "You've seen 'em, haven't you, mister?"
"Mountains? A great many."
Allegheny broke in: "I dunno's these di'mon's is just what _I_ expected
'em to be. They are and--they ain't. I'm kind of disapp'inted."
Gray smiled. "That is true of most things that we anticipate or aspire
to. It's the tragedy of accomplishment--to find that our rewards are
never quite up to our expectations."
"Do they cost much?"
"Oh, decidedly! The prices are all plainly marked. Please look them
over."
Ma Briskow did as urged, but the shock was paralyzing; delight,
admiration, expectancy, gave place to horrified amazement at the
figures upon the tags. She shook her head slowly and made repeated
sounds of disapproval.
"Tse! Tse! Tse! Why, your pa's crazy! Plumb crazy!"
Although the mother's principal emotion for the moment was aroused by
the price marks on the price tags, Allegheny paid little attention to
them and began vainly fitting ring after ring to her fingers. All were
too small, however; most of them refused to pass even the first joint,
and Gray realized now what Gus Briskow had meant when he wrote for
rings "of large sises." Eventually the girl found one that slipped into
place, and this she regarded with complacent admiration.
"This one'll do for me," she declared. "And it's a whopper!"
Gray took her hand in his; as yet it had not been greatly distorted by
manual labor, but the nails were dull and cracked and ragged and they
were inlaid in deep mourning. "I don't believe you'll like that
mounting," he said, gently. "It's what we call a man's ring. This is
the kind women usually wear." He held up a thin platinum band of
delicate workmanship which Allegheny examined with frank disdain.
[Image: "THIS ONE'LL DO FOR ME," SHE DECLARED. "AND IT'S A WHOPPER!"]
"Pshaw! I'd bust that the first time I hoed a row of 'taters," she
declared. "I got to have things stout, for me."
"But," Gray protested, in even a milder voice, "you probably wouldn't
want to wear expensive jewelry in the garden."
Miss Briskow held her hand high, admiring the play of light upon the
facets of the splendid jewel, then she voiced a complacent thought that
has been variously expressed by other women better circumstanced than
she--"If we can afford to buy 'em, I reckon we can afford to wear 'em."
Not until Gray had suggested that her days of work in the fields were
probably about ended did the girl's expression change. Then indeed her
interest was arrested. She regarded him with a sudden quickening of
imagination; she revolved the novel idea in her mind.
"From what my driver has told me about the Briskow farm," he ran on,
"you won't have to work at anything, unless you care to."
Allie continued to weigh this new thought in her mind; that it
intrigued her was plain, but she made no audible comment.