Part 36 (1/2)
”I got to like 'em,” returned the old man. ”I eat 'em--breakfast, dinner, and supper. Grub don't taste good any more 'less a twister's pa.s.sed over it and seasoned it up. Who are you?”
Hiram swung his great frame from the creaking saddle.
”I'm Hiram Hooker,” he announced, lowering the mare's reins and advancing until a mouse-colored burro aimed a kick at him to show him that he was a rank outsider whose company was not desired.
”Why, Muta, that ain't no way to act!” mildly expostulated the burro's master. ”She's just a mite playful,” he explained apologetically to Hiram. ”Muta, she thinks a heap o' the ole man, ye see, an' she's always lookin' out that strangers don't mean 'im any harm.”
He placed both arms about the s.h.a.ggy burro's neck. ”You must be more polite, Muta,” he said chidingly, while the little animal trust out her upper lip and nibbled at the large horn b.u.t.tons on his dusty canvas coat.
”Which way are you bound?” asked Hiram.
”South now. Just travelin'. Maybe I'll make it over to Rattlesnake b.u.t.tes”--he raised an arm toward the northeast--”and maybe down Caldron Canon way.” He pointed southeast toward the mountains. ”I dunno--just driftin' along, me an' the little fellas. Sometimes we drift here, and sometimes we drift there. Don't matter much, s'long's there's grub an'
a little rolled barley in the pack-bags. What's the dif'rence anyway?”
His red-lidded eyes looked up weirdly at Hiram.
Bent and pathetic he was, this old man of the hills and deserts--this old lizard of the unfriendly sands. In his eyes all time seemed to have written its history. His brows were s.h.a.ggy and desert-colored, like the brows of the Ancient Mariner whose scrawny, clutching fingers robbed the Wedding Guest of his night of pleasure. His hands shook, and he carried a long cane; but for him the merciless desert seemed to hold no lasting terror, for he spent his life on its desert searching for the treasure that is hidden there.
”Me and the little fellas just drift along. We get work at the camps when our grubstake's gone; and then we ramble on and on--just driftin', kinda. I got a ole jack rabbit for supper, pardner. He was sleepin'
under a sagebrush, and I puts out his eye with my six and twenty paces.
Can you do that? But you're young--young and got a clever eye.
Anyway, I got a ole jack for supper. Now, if you had a bottle on you couldn't we have a time!”
”I've no bottle,” Hiram said. ”I'm sorry. But, if you'll invite me, I'll help you with the jack.”
”Got blankets behind yer saddle, I see. All right, my friend. Ole Filer's always ready to share his grub with a pa.s.ser-by on the desert.
There's water in my little tank. Burros don't drink much, you know. A taste's enough till we get to a camp to-morrow. Handy, those camps, for prospectors needin' a grubstake. Let's camp over there by that lonesome yucca palm. He looks as if he wanted company. Maybe he'll whisper where they's gold to-night--if we keep on ear awake. He-he!
Oh, they whisper lots--lots--lots! But they always lie like sin!”
When the ”ole jack” had paid the final price of his lack of watchfulness, Hiram Hooker and the crazy prospector leaned back and looked up at the cold stars that smiled cruelly down on the arid waste.
The wind whispered mysteriously through the bayonets of the yucca palm above them. Not long would one be obliged to live and move and have his being alone on this desert before strange messages would begin to formulate in the wind's eerie whispering in the yuccas.
The burros ranged about, browsing off the desert growth. There had been barley for Babe, and Hiram had watered her at the last camp. A rinse-out of her mouth and she would do very well till morning.
And there under the scornful stars Hiram and the old man lounged on packbags and talked, with their tiny camp fire of greasewood roots between them. And gradually as Hiram told what he knew and convinced the gray old rat of his honesty, an uncanny tale of the barren lands began unfolding, a tale revolving about a little girl baby left by prospectors in a yucca-trunk corral--the tale of Jean Prince, daughter of Leonard Prince, whose bones had been gnawed by coyotes and covered by the s.h.i.+fting sands for over twenty years. And the baby girl, Jean Prince, was none other than the magnetic, dark-haired woman who now drove jerkline to Ragtown and numbered her admirers by the thousand--Jerkline Jo, Queen of the Outland Camps.
”They was three of us at first,” narrated Filer in a shaky voice.
”Three of us and Baby Jean. Baby Jean and me and Len Prince and 'The c.h.i.n.k.' And that makes four. But Baby Jean was only two years old.
”Hong Duo was the c.h.i.n.k--a grinnin' yenshee hound from up beyond the Tehachapi--way up--up toward the Sierra Nevadas, in the placer country.
White prospectors ner white miners don't often work with c.h.i.n.ks.
c.h.i.n.ks is only good for workin' tailin's when it comes to mines. But Len he'd saved Hong Duo's life in trouble in a dump in Placerville--ol'
Hangtown--and the c.h.i.n.k had clung to um like a burro to somethin' he's swiped from Camp.
”Agin' that, too, the c.h.i.n.k had money--an' Len and me was broke. Fer a year he grubstaked us, and followed us around pocketin' up that a way, cookin' and such, and livin' for Len and Baby Jean.
”Baby Jean's maw she died when the kid was borned; and everywhere Len went after she was a year or more he took her. We drifted south--me and Len and the c.h.i.n.k and Baby Jean.
”Up Death Valley way we got wind o' somethin' good. Days and days we makes it into the land that G.o.d forgot, and here and there we pecked out a little color. Then Len and me we gets a lead, and we leaves the c.h.i.n.k and Baby Jean and drifts on into a country that makes me s.h.i.+ver yet ta think of.
”We got some gold--quite some. And me”--his voice grew low--”I was younger then, and mean as dirt. I was high-gradin' on my pardner right and left. I guess I was always mean; but I've paid the price.
”Then Len he gets onto me, but he holds his tongue. And we make it on and on into Little Hall, till the sandstorm come.