Part 28 (2/2)
All eyes within were focused on a couple waltzing in the center of the floor to low music. The man was a Mr. Dalworth, Ragtown's new banker, in charge of the branch of a Los Angeles banking inst.i.tution that had been opened in the frontier camp. The girl, smiling and radiant and glistening with pale-blue silk and gems, was his adventure girl, Jerkline Jo.
Never had Hiram seen Jo in anything but a flannel s.h.i.+rt, Stetson hat, and chaps or divided riding skirt. Despite the fact that she was making money fast and that he was working for her at ninety dollars a month, Hiram had not before looked upon her as entirely out of his reach. He was learning fast, and had lost much of his backwoods uncouthness. He loved Jerkline Jo as only a big-hearted, simple-souled man can love a woman. Some day, he had told himself, he would do something to make himself worthy of her, for he never would ask her to marry him while he was in her employ. He was too proud to ask an independent girl to marry him when he had nothing to offer.
That rare feminine creature gliding so gracefully over the floor with the dapper, well-dressed banker, however, plunged Hiram into the depths of despair. Financially, mentally, and now socially, he felt her altogether out of his world. He had forgotten until now her days at school and in polite society.
It did not make him think the worse of her to see her dancing in a saloon, with rough men from the cities standing about and looking on admirably. Ragtown was Ragtown, and people did things here which would have ostracized them from decent society elsewhere. It was not this that hurt; he knew that the girl was pure-minded and that her morals were flawless, despite what prudish persons--of which there were none in Ragtown--might have thought of her choice of the place which she chose to satisfy her whim of the evening. Jo was one of those rare souls who can pa.s.s among evil men and women and not only not be contaminated, but preserve an unsullied reputation, too. It was the dress and the glittering tones and the wonderful coiffure, and her gentlemanly, well-groomed partner of the dance, that caused him to turn away, bitter and broken in spirit.
”Well, how do you like her to-night?” came a taunting voice.
Lucy Dalles had stepped beside him and peering in at the revel.
”Some cla.s.s, eh? Some lady, I'll say! Oh, sure!”
Hiram could have choked her, but without a remark he sped away from her into the night.
It was then that Lucy Dallas clenched her teeth and hurled invective at the radiant girl within.
She left the scene and hurried back to her little cabin, where the crazy prospector, Basil Filer, lay in a heap on the floor, snoring loudly.
A moment after her entry Al Drummond came in again with another man following him.
”How much jack did you leave him?” he whispered to the girl.
”I left it all. It's safest. What I copied from the paper will be worth a thousand times what's in that money bag.”
”Just the same, I want money now--to-night,” Drummond said, and, stooping, pulled the poke from the s.h.i.+rt front of the unconscious miner.
”Take only half of it, then,” Lucy pleaded. ”Then he'll think he spent that much. Don't be a piker, Al. You've got something big to work for, and you try to spoil it by rolling a stiff for a few dollars.”
Drummond grunted, slipped a wad of bills into his trousers pocket, and replaced the poke in the desert rat's s.h.i.+rt.
”All right, Stool,” he said to the other man. ”You take his head; I'll take his feet.”
A little later a train of pack burros moved away from Ragtown into the desert night.
A mile from town the man Stool halted them and waited, and presently heard the chug of a motor. Soon Al Drummond drove up in the last of his five-ton trucks, in the bottom of which, tossed about, lay the still unconscious form of the old prospector.
The two men worked swiftly, and slanted two twelve-inch planks two inches thick from the rear end of the truck to the ground. With ropes about the necks of the desert rat's six burros, they hauled and hammered and coaxed them one by one aboard the truck. Then on into the night they drove, over the vast, black desert.
Seventy-five miles from Ragtown they stopped the car, and unloaded the burros and their snoring master. They rolled the man in his blankets, then set the burros' packs about in orderly array and loosed the little animals to crop the bunch gra.s.s that was green and succulent in winter.
From one pack bag they took cooking utensils and other articles, and ranged them about on the ground as the old man himself might have done upon making camp.
”He'll wake up to-morrow and think he dreamed about Ragtown,” chuckled Drummond.
”He sure will know he's nutty then,” said Stool.
They climbed once more into the truck, and before dawn were back in the city of tents and new pine shacks.
<script>