THE RIDER OF THE MOHAVE
A Western Story
By JAMES FELLOM
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers--New York
Published by arrangement with Chelsea House
Printed in U. S. A.
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Copyright, 1924
By CHELSEA HOUSE
The Rider of the Mohave
(Printed in the United States of America)
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian.
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To those who, having paid the penalty for their misdeeds, seek to
regain their places in the ranks of the law-abiding, this book is
sympathetically dedicated
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CONTENTS
Prologue He Rides by Night
I Mania and Dreams
II The Man Hunter
III In Which Wills Collide
IV Lemuel Yields
V The Wherewithal
VI Aftermath
VII Startling Predicaments
VIII Lavender and Old Lace
IX Evidence to Convict
X A Disclosure
XI Outwitted
XII Reputations at Stake
XIII Sinister Forebodings
XIV An Episode in the Hills
XV The Potent Influence
XVI The Hand of Quintell
XVII One Silent Night
XVIII Skulking Shadows
XIX An Enemy in the Ranks
XX Geerusalem Stirs
XXI The Law and the Lawless
XXII A Showdown
XXIII The Uprising
XXIV Warburton Gets Square
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THE RIDER OF THE MOHAVE
PROLOGUE—HE RIDES BY NIGHT
It was three in the morning, but Geerusalem had not yet closed its
eyes. There was too much undug gold in the hills; it was too
handy—too easy come, easy go; the days, too short; the pleasures,
too wanton, too alluring. The camp of Geerusalem promenaded,
gambled, danced, fought, debauched the night away, waiting for
to-morrow. Far out on desolate Soapweed Plains, rose the
intermittent, yelping wail-bark of a coyote.
The back door of a little store that fronted on the main street
opened cautiously. The interior of what was a kitchen was dark; the
flower-garden yard into which it gave, was also dark. The shadowy
form of a man emerged and halted; he peered carefully about through
the gloom. A smaller figure followed, pausing on the threshold—a
woman, her white apron and snowy hair quite visible. The man turned,
took her in his arms impulsively, and held her close to his breast.
“Don’t you worry, ma. I’ll be droppin’ round again, two weeks from
to-night—sure’s sic ’em!” he whispered, as he kissed her.
The woman wept softly. “Oh, Jerome, darling, why don’t you quit this
awful thing?” she sobbed, clinging to him. “Don’t you know how my
heart’s just breaking?”
“Too late, ma. I oughter’ve quit ’fore I begun. If I started
quittin’ now, they wouldn’t let me, would they? But I’m tellin’ you;
don’t think about me. They can’t ketch me. I’ve bin goin’ it three
years, ain’t I? Well, then, when you see Tinnemaha Pete, tell him to
leave you a chunk of that ore. An’ see that he don’t tell nobody
about findin’ it. I figger it’s a bonanza. Mebby, that’ll mean
better days. Well, we’ll see what’s doin’. Now, I’d better be
scootin’, honey. An’ don’t you worry, see?” He kissed her again,
tenderly, many times, breathing his last injunction into her ear.
A few seconds later he had slipped like a shadow across the yard and
was stealing out of an alleyway between two adobe buildings, heading
for the back street. That street was black, deserted, the nocturnal
population of the camp confining itself to the bright lights and
attractions that converted the one business thoroughfare into a
brilliant avenue, noisy with ribald merrymaking and adventure.
Near by stood his horse. He reached it and, with a vigilant glance
about, threw back one of the flaps of his saddlebags and plunged a
rummaging hand inside. It came forth with a folded piece of wrapping
paper and several nails he had placed there the day before.
With a reckless chuckle, he wound his bandanna around his face
leaving only his eyes exposed; then he mounted and rode off to the
next cross street, and thence to the brilliantly lighted hub of the
town. The bulletin board of the Geerusalem _Searchlight_, an
afternoon newspaper, loomed big and black on the edge of the
sidewalk, in the full glare of window lights. It was one of those
moments when the immediate vicinity was clear of promenaders.
Seeing this, the rider spurred over to the bulletin board, unfolded
the sheet of wrapping paper, and nailed it on the black surface with
the butt of his six-shooter. Then, he caracoled his horse about,
fired a volley into the air and, throwing the whole strength of his
lungs into a wild howl, waved his hat to a crowd of men standing
before the Miners’ Hotel, and dashed away around the nearest street
corner, bound for the lonely, trailless reaches of the Mohave Desert
far to the south.
The horde of curious night revelers swarming to the spot, a few
seconds later, read with varying degrees of emotion the rough
printed notice on the bulletin board:
I bin lookin three year for Sheriff Warburton an cant find him.
Ill give $5,000 to git akquainted with the county fameous
detektive.
Your lovin bandit,
Billy Gee.
CHAPTER I—MANIA AND DREAMS
Lemuel Huntington had told himself a thousand times that his Dot
must have an education. He had long since become infatuated with the
notion. It had him gripped as tenaciously as the seductive toils of
romance had the imaginative Dot enmeshed. It was a consuming mania
with him.
“If I got to steal the money, she’s goin’ to college—the dream of
her darlin’ dead mother. S’help me, I’ll turn thief if I got to!”
Lemuel, the failure, was fifty-one—the age when most men begin to
slow down, whether they want to or not. Twenty years before, he and
his little bride had left a perfectly good living in Iowa to try a
short cut to fortune in California. The fact that more often than
not distance is a most captivating beckoner, did not occur to these
happy newlyweds until they reached the Golden State and found that a
tremendous army—also seeking sudden wealth—had preceded them, and
was daily being augmented by regiments of recruits from the four
corners of the globe.
The discovery appalled them—their capital being alarmingly small;
and nearly two years of drifting from little town to little town,
just managing to get by, took the heart out of them.
Then, one day, Lemuel brought home news of a tract of government
land known as Soapweed Plains, on the north rim of the Mohave
Desert, with enticing reports of rich mineral belts in the adjacent
mountain ranges. It looked like the opportunity for which they had
waited. They would homestead, and in a few years Huntington would be
a name indelibly branded on the cattle industry of the State. And
there was the further golden prospect of rich mines!
Packing their few belongings, husband and wife bought tickets to the
dismal wind-whipped station of Mirage, on the Mohave & Southwestern
Railroad, and spent two everlasting days shooing a trinity of
stubborn burros over a hell waste, into the new land of promise. But
again the captivating beckoner had tricked them. Soapweed Plains was
a sweltering realm of sagebrush, sand and sidewinders, twenty-five
miles wide, divided off from the rest of the desert universe by a
horseshoe barricade of saw-edge peaks and table mountains that
abutted a sky-line mesa to the south—and by serenading coyotes by
night.
In despair, the Huntingtons filed on two quarter sections of sand
and rubble, the west side of their claims overlapping a bunch-grass
hill; the narrow strip on the east was handy to those scant benefits
of irrigation so grudgingly bestowed by the tepid
disappearing-reappearing Mohave River. Here, at least, they might
coax a living out of the soil, said Lemuel dolefully. It was a
permanent anchorage, if nothing more, sighed his wife. And they
started grubbing away a site for a home and killing the sidewinding
rattlesnakes.
Soon, they found that the potato thrived, as did the melon and
alfalfa; found, too, that it was a paradise for bees. They contrived
to get a cow and heifer, a span of desert-broke horses, and a
rattletrap buckboard. Prospectors learned about the Huntington ranch
and, finding it handier to go there after certain commodities than
to far-off Mirage, began patronizing it. Its popularity grew. As a
result, Lemuel added a stock of bacon, beans, condensed milk, sugar,
matches, and such staple supplies to his assorted farm products, and
reaped a comfortable profit therefrom.
Then Dot came—and the lonely brush ranch became the nucleus of
Lemuel and Emily’s resurrected hopes, for they began planning
wonderful things for their first-born, and, not the least among
these things, an education that would make her a great lady of
accomplishments some day.
But the years dragged by, one after the other, in that
out-of-the-way land, so woefully lacking in
transportation—empty-handed years almost, that held out scarcely
more than a possibility at any time that those precious plans of
theirs would ever be fulfilled. It would take a fat purse indeed to
send Dot to select Longwell Seminary in San Francisco and keep her
there in becoming luxury until she blossomed forth a chosen daughter
of California’s élite.
When Dot was twelve her brave little mother died, and for a long
time afterward, Lemuel went about like a man desperately searching
for something he had lost without knowing just what it was. His
resurrected hopes died with her, and were buried. Everything slowed
down to a point where he merely held on to a bare living for himself
and his child.
To-day, he was a failure, that child eighteen, while the only
remaining echo of the precious plans to make Dot a grand lady was
this secret wild mania of his, seething in the core of his brain, to
see that daughter educated before they laid him beside the trim
little grave in the garden.
Perhaps it was this same mania of his that now led him to haunt the
nearest place where brains forgathered—the gold camp of Geerusalem,
four miles northeast of the Huntington ranch—and to get to
hobnobbing with its insolent brotherhood of mining engineers,
promoters, assayers, and attorneys—a type of individual that looms
up in the mind of the crude Southwest as prodigious as totem poles,
omniscient and omnipotent.
Whatever it was that made Lemuel enjoy being the butt of this uppish
fraternity’s quips and sneers, and come back regularly for more,
hardly matters. Month in and month out, as often as he could get
away from the ranch, he would saddle a horse and ride to Geerusalem,
and spend the day strutting around with the forty-five caliber
brains of the camp. Accordingly, day after day, Dot, the
imaginative, was left to herself and the weaving of her wistful,
romantic dreams.
She was a bright little body, this eighteen-year-old daughter of
Lemuel, the failure; face so frank and sensitive, hair so soft and
wavy and glossy, throat so round and smooth. Her eyes were large and
brown, and sometimes quite sad from gazing too long into the
monotonous distances out of whose blue haze nothing of living
substance ever came. She had grown to charming young womanhood, but
she still retained the fanciful mind of her pinafore days—the little
story-teller had survived as her playmate, Frank Norris would have
said—with all a youngster’s fascination for impossible stories of
impossible beings.
She would sit by the hour dreaming of handsome blond heroes rescuing
beautiful maidens from the clutches of Tatarian villains, with
wicked flowing black mustaches and bushy eyebrows, of magnificent
daredevil bandits succoring helpless widows and orphans, of
notorious Billy Gee even, about whose wild, desperate exploits up
and down the Mohave and Colorado Deserts she had heard so much, of
hairbreadth escapes, furious bloody duels, and brilliant weddings.
The isolated ranch was an ideal spot for the painting of just such
thrilling mind pictures. She could sit on the front porch and look
across the gray desolation of plain that stretched to the violet and
yellow scallop of range twenty miles eastward, and visualize in that
void of undulating air currents every scene her fertile imagination
conjured up for her. She lived those scenes, every one of them. They
were big moments in her life; palpitating, vivid moments—moments
that made her dreary, humdrum existence worth while to her.
“Nothing ever happens out here,” she would sometimes murmur to the
eternal sameness of the plains. “Nobody ever comes this way, even. I
wish daddy would sell the ranch and move to Geerusalem or
somewhere—where things happen, where people laugh and talk and
visit.”
On a number of occasions, Lemuel had found her sitting on the front
porch, musing into the solitudes, eyes brilliant, cheeks aglow, her
parted lips moving.
“Gosh, what a pity!” he had lamented to himself each time, as he
went tiptoeing away. “It’s them fine brains of hers workin’. I tell
you, Em’ly, wife, she’s goin’ to be the great lady you figgered on,
if I got to sell my soul to do it. I’m jest watchin’ for a chanct.
You wait an’ see!”
It was well on toward noon of an August day. A fiery sun was
churning the floor of Soapweed Plains into a stormy ocean of heat
waves. Lemuel had gone to Geerusalem on his customary hobnobbing
expedition. Dot, her housework completed, sat reading in the shade
of the passion-flower vine that trellised the porch, a novel
borrowed from Mrs. Agatha Liggs, a widow who kept a small dry goods
store in the camp.
Suddenly, breaking on the dead silence like muffled shots, came the
sound of hoofs. Dot dropped her book and sprang to her feet
expectantly, for the riders who passed that way, bound to and from
the unimportant desert station of Mirage, were few indeed and far
between. The next instant she was staring at a lone horseman
approaching, not along the road but from across country, from the
direction of the violet and yellow scallop of range that formed the
magical setting of all her romantic dreams!
She stared in unbelief, amazed for the moment. Then she noticed that
he was hatless, that the whole side of his head, the whole front of
his dirty, white shirt, were crimson with blood, that he reeled
drunkenly, lifelessly in the saddle.
Aghast at the spectacle, she gazed on, rooted to the spot, until the
exhausted horse stumbled up to the barred gate and stopped,
drooping, rocking on quivering legs. Out of the gate she darted
then, threw down the bars and led the animal up to the house, her
heart fluttering with excitement and horror.
The rider was in a half swoon, mumbling thickly. Above his right ear
was a long, bloody furrow, like the plow of a bullet. The bandanna
he had had for a bandage had slipped down over his face, neglected.
It was saturated. He had been bleeding for hours, was her horrifying
thought. A glance told her that he was a stranger. That same glance
informed her that he was probably twenty-five, fairly good-looking
even through his coating of dust and blood, and that he wore a
double cartridge belt and a brace of six-shooters, one of which he
still held gripped in his hand.
Ordinarily, she would have been quite unable to handle the dead
weight he represented, but now she managed to drag him out of the
saddle and into the house without being particularly conscious of
the effort. She got him on the parlor lounge finally and plunged
into the work of bathing his wound and dressing it. Then she tore
away his sodden shirts, replaced them with two of her father’s, and
brought a dipper of water and poured it in little swallows down his
throat.
Seating herself in a chair beside him, she looked him over
curiously, studied him. Who was he? What was he? The wound? Under
less shocking circumstances, it was quite probable he would have
proved a big treat to her vivid imagination. But now there somehow
seemed to be too much tragic reality about him to make her care to
commit him and his plight to the wild flings of fancy.
At last he opened his eyes and stared up at her vaguely. They were
blue eyes. There was an odd, hunted glint in them, a smolder of
recklessness, a shadow of sadness, exhaustion. He raised an
uncertain hand to his bandaged head. He glanced around the room,
then back at her, his wits clearing suddenly.
“Where am I? Whose—whose place is this?” he jerked out, with an
effort.
“This is Lemuel Huntington’s ranch. I’m his daughter, Dot.” She
thought a queer interest leaped into his eyes at the information.
“You must be quiet, now. You’ve lost a lot of blood, but you’ll be
all right,” she went on, when he did not speak. “If I fixed you
something, could you eat?” She rose from her chair.
But he detained her, in a sudden spasm of apprehension. “My—my
saddlebags! I—they——” he faltered hoarsely.
“They’re safe outside,” she nodded. “Do you want them?”
“Please, sister. Bring ’em here. Hurry! I—I want ’em handy.”
She ran out of the front door to the horse which still stood,
untethered, on sagging legs. Unfastening the leather containers, she
carried them into the house. She remarked that while they were not
especially heavy, they bulged to capacity, their flaps buckled
securely. She remarked also the man’s relief at sight of them and
how profusely he thanked her. Then he instructed her to stow them
under the head of the lounge and asked her for a drink of water. But
when she returned with a dipperful, she found him sunk into a sleep
of exhaustion. Whereupon she darkened the room, closed the door
quietly behind her, and went outside again to look after the spent
horse.
Watering the animal, she tied it in a stall in the barn to feed.
Then she inspected the stranger’s saddle carefully. It was typical
of the parts, without an identifying mark of any kind upon it,
except splashes of dried blood. Presently she fastened the barn door
and reëntered the house. Her mysterious patient still slept. It was
a few minutes past noon, and she sat down to her customary
warmed-over meal in the kitchen, but she could not eat.