CHAPTER XIIITHE CHILDREN OF AMRAM
“NITA, what’n the mischief you doin’ here? And it pretty near dark!”
Mart Canby, recognizing his sister’s voice, galloped swiftly to meet her at the edge of Stlingbloke.
“Oh, Mart!” she cried in a low, tense tone. “I’ve had a dreadful experience. Let’s get out of here. Come on; I’ll tell you as we ride.”
“But I gotta find the sheriff,” persisted the messenger with his old boy-on-the-burning-deck determination.
“He’s not here; come on. Please, Martie!”
They galloped down the now noisy street to Stlingbloke, and took to the desert, which now seemed more friendly than ever to the girl, who loved it always.
“What was you doin’ there, Nita? That ain’t no place for you. You was chasin’ me!”
“I know it. I admit it. I’ll tell you if you’ll give me time.”
“Where you goin’? Don’t cut across the desert, I gotta follow the grade. I missed the sheriff. He——”
“I know. But he’s not at Stlingbloke. He rode on through, on his way back. Maybe he has gone back to Mangan-Hatton’s for to-night. You can find him better to-morrow morning.”
Mart granted. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
When she told him he youthfully decided to turn directly back and punish Blacky Silk, but the girl pleaded with him to ride on. He was envious of his sister in actually having had the experience of “throwing down” on a man. Mart had packed a six for three years, and had never had the opportunity to throw down on anything more threatening than a coyote. He agreed to spare Blacky when she assured him that nothing serious had occurred; then, manlike, he began to scold her for getting herself into such a predicament.
Both talked at once on the various subjects uppermost in their minds, and as Mart was hungry and mannishly ill-humored accordingly, they verged upon a quarrel.
“Why’d you tag me?” he burst out at last.
“Why did you treat me as you did, then?”
“Why’d you try to swipe the evidence?”
“I didn’t.”
“You did! You put ’er in er pocket!”
“I just wanted to examine it Mart.”
“Didn’t you? Course you did! You tried to swipe ’er. I guess I could have you sent up forthat. And I oughta do it, too, I guess. If you wasn’t my own sister——”
“Fiddlesticks! I just wanted to see it. I didn’t get to—good. Let me see it again, Mart.”
“Huh!”
“Please!”
“It’s too dark.”
“I’ll light a match.”
“What d’ye wants see it for, Nita? You gi’me a pain!”
“I want to see if I can make out what the writing means. I can’t even remember all of it.”
“None of us could. It’s loco.”
“Let me try to make out what it means, Mart.”
“And you rode all the way to Stlingbloke after me just for that?”
“Uh-huh!” There was a caress in the female’s tones now. Mart loved his sister. They always had been pals. The carrying of the “ev’dence” to the sheriff was probably the biggest event in Martin’s life. Here was his old pal pleading to share in his triumph.
“Will ye give ’er right back?”
“Uh-huh—course I will.”
“You ain’t got any match.”
“I have, too. I always carry matches.”
“Pa Squawtooth better not find it out.”
“He knows. Suppose something was to happen, and I had to cook a jack rabbit on the desert tokeep me from starving. Or get caught in front of a forest fire and be obliged to back fire.”
“Well, you wanta keep ’em outa the stables, anyway.”
“Of course. Are you going to show me the cover, Martie? Please, now!”
“Here, then. Now don’t drop it, like you do everything.”
As he passed it over something plunked lightly in the sand between the ponies.
“Oh, dear! Wait! I—I did drop it, Mart!”
“Confound it! I knew you would!” Mart reined in. “Don’t let your mare tromp it into the sand now.”
They dismounted, lighted matches, and groped about through the sand. The male was blusteringly angry. Meekly the girl remained quiet under his deluge of rebuke, seeming to sense for once her many shortcomings.
“Please don’t scold, Martie!” she begged. “We’ll find it.”
“Yes, we will—not! Now you’ve ruined everything! Confound it, Nita, you’re always buttin’ in and puttin’ the kibosh on things!”
“I’m so sorry. I—surely we’ll find it.”
“If I do you’ll never see ’er ag’in; don’t ferget that!”
“All right. Only don’t be mean.”
“Ah!” Mart sucked in his breath. “I got ’er!Almost hid in the sand. Now you keep yer nose outa what don’t concern ye, will ye?”
“Ye-yes, brother.”
In outraged dignity the boy mounted, thrusting into a pocket of his chaps the cover of the book of cigarette papers his sister had bought at Stlingbloke, and from which she had torn the contents. In a pocket of her own chaps safely reposed the “ev’dence.” Mart Canby had much to learn of the wiles of the other sex, but it would have been a difficult matter to convince him of this fact.
“We must be hurrying,” meekly said Manzanita.
“I wonder if the sheriff didn’t stop at that camp over there for to-night.” Mart pointed through the blackness to a cluster of lights on their left. “I oughta follow the grade, Nita, and stop at every camp.”
To his surprise his seemingly chastened sister did not object now.
“Maybe you ought,” she replied. “It’s not a great deal farther for us to go home that way. If I go over with you, and he happens to be there, will you promise to give it to him and hurry right back to me? Pa’ll be worried about me if he got home this evening.”
“Aw, worried nothin’! You been ridin’ the desert nights ever since I c’n remember.”
“But there’s no moon to-night. And that businessat Stlingbloke has made me nervous. I want to get home.”
“Well, come on, then.”
“Do you promise? Just give it to him, if you find him in any of the camps, and don’t wait to hear what he has to say. You’ll know all about it later, anyway.”
“All right; come on.”
Mart found the sheriff smoking in the commissary tent of the first camp out of Stlingbloke. He handed the pasteboard cover to him and explained how it had come into the possession of the searching party in the mountains.
“There’s some funny writin’ in it,” he began.
But before he could get any farther his sister called to him sharply from outside, and he remembered his promise and reluctantly turned away and joined her.
They set their ponies’ faces in a bee line for Squawtooth and galloped away into the night.
It was ten o’clock next morning when Manzanita rode to see Wing o’ the Crow again. Mart had resentfully returned to the mountains early that morning, ordered to do so by his father. The black-haired girl looked up with a question in her large, luminous eyes as Manzanita reached her in the borrow pit.
“I got it!” triumphantly announced the cowgirl, alighting from her saddle.
Wing o’ the Crow took the pasteboard cover. “Is that all it was?”
“Look inside.”
The gypo queen’s lips parted as she opened the cover and read:
“The sons also of Aaron; Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar.”
“He wrote that!” she said chokingly, looking up with wide, scared eyes.
Manzanita told all about it then.
“Pa’s gone to Stlingbloke,” said Wing o’ the Crow listlessly. “He’s all gowed up ag’in. I’m runnin’ the outfit. Will be now fer a week, I reckon. And I’m all wore out, too. Now this has come!”
“Wing-o,” said Manzanita softly, “you love Halfaman Daisy, don’t you?”
The gypo queen’s black eyes, suddenly afloat with tears, looked unabashed into the hazel eyes of her friend. “O’ course,” she answered simply. “And you love his pardner, don’t you?”
Manzanita’s cheeks went crimson. “I—I think so,” she made confession. “I can’t say it right out like you do, Wing-o; but I want to protect him. He didn’t steal that bullion.”
“He’s went away with Halfaman,” the other dully pointed out.
“I know. But—but he just couldn’t do such a thing. There’s some horrible mistake.”
“Wasn’t any mistake about that pink tie,” returned Wing o’ the Crow. “Halfaman come sportin’ it ’round the first night he come to see me. Thought it was the grandest thing, the poor nut! And now that cover. Who else would write that foolishness into a book o’ cigarette papers? Halfaman’s wrote that all over the United States. He writes it on everything, or something like it. It’s all the Bible he ever read, and I reckon he’s proud o’ his education. He’s just a big-eared nut, that’s all.”
“What shall we do, Wing-o?”
“Keep this hid, anyway, or burn it up. What’d you write in the other cover that Mart give to the sheriff?”
“Oh, I scarce know what I wrote, I was so rattled at the time. I saw Mart riding in, and I couldn’t think of anything but that fresh creature that had been insulting me. He called himself Blacky Silk. And I wrote that three times. But really I wasn’t trying to implicate the fellow. I was afraid I couldn’t get Mart away from the sheriff before he’d told him there was writing on the inside. And I was right about that. He did tell him, in spite of me. So I just wrote ‘Blacky Silk, Blacky Silk, Blacky Silk’ three times. I couldn’t seem to think of anything else.”
“I guess you didn’t do so bad, after all,” said the girl of the camps. “I’ve heard Blacky Silk’s a bad actor.”
“What is he?”
“Gambler, I guess. He usta smuggle opium and Chinamen into the States over the Mexican border, they say. He did a stretch for it. I heard he was in with the po-lice and slipped ’em somethin’. They call it ‘Black Silk’ when a po-liceman gets a drag from an opium runner or a chink runner. That’s how come it he’s got that name.
“You couldn’t ’a’ done better,” she went on. “I hate that fella. He follies the camps and robs the stiffs and does anything mean. I wouldn’t care if what you wrote was to send ’im up for life.”
“But really I didn’t mean to implicate him, Wing-o. I—I was just all nerves, and so mad and scared I could hardly think or see. And I wrote the first thing that came into my mind, I had to hurry so.”
“Don’t worry about that. Tell me if your Falcon said anythin’ before he pulled out that made you suspicious.”
“I didn’t even know he was going until I saw him in the stage.”
“Same here with that cuckoo, Daisy. Funny! Once Halfaman was braggin’ about what he was gonta do one o’ these days. He said your Falconwas in on it. He was tryin’ to be mysterious. I couldn’t get ’im. D’ye know anything about that?”
“No—nothing. Oh, I don’t know what to do or think. I can’t believe either of them guilty—I won’t believe The Falcon is!”
Wing o’ the Crow said nothing to this.
“What shall we do?” repeated Manzanita. “Oh, I wish they’d come back!”
“We’ll jest lay low and keep our mouths shut,” was the shanty queen’s decision. “If they do come back we’ll find out all about it.”
Manzanita mounted to ride back to Squawtooth, and her higher elevation in the saddle brought to view a dust cloud hanging over the chaparral a short distance away.
“What’s coming?” she asked, pointing.
Wing o’ the Crow climbed on her wheeler and steadied herself by holding to the Johnson bar.
“Some kind of an outfit,” she answered. “Not railroaders, I guess—all the outfits are in now, except Demarest, Spruce & Tillou’s. What’s comin’ wouldn’t make a wart on their outfit. Desert rats, maybe.”
Manzanita stayed her departure, and the two girls waited and watched, for travelers on the desert whose progress makes an appreciable dust cloud always aroused curiosity.
It was evident that the moving outfit was of some length, composed of a number of animals andvehicles. The desert wind was blowing, however, and a haze of dust surrounded it, so that not until the cavalcade left the main road and cut across straight toward Jeddo’s did Wing o’ the Crow recognize the foremost driver.
“Mercy!” she cried suddenly. “There’s the begatter now!”
“What?”
“Two skinners. The other’n must be your Falcon. Yes—sure it is! Well, goodness me—what d’ye know ’bout that!”
The small procession marched on over the sand heaps and neared the borrow pit. The sagging grin of Mr. Phinehas Daisy greeted them from behind the team in the lead. Abreast of him another span of strong mules drew up and came to rest, and Falcon the Flunky was their driver. In all there were ten teams of brown mules, young, thin-limbed, well fed, and all wearing shining new harness. Behind some of them trailed ten new number-two wheelers, whose pans never had disturbed plowed earth.
Mr. Daisy widened his grin and swept off his broken-visored cap.
“Greetings, ladies!” he said. “How’s every inconsiderable element this mornin’?”
The Falcon smiled gravely and lifted his hat.
“Where you been, Halfaman?” challenged Wing o’ the Crow.
“Shoppin’ for mules and harness and wheelers and things. Cast yer black lamps over this here display of railroad haberdashery, apple blossoms. This here’s the new half of the Phinehas-Abishua Construction Company. Where’s the dad?”
“At Stlingbloke.”
“Good night! Well, le’s unhitch ’em, ole Falcon.”
“Daisy, whose shave tails an’ wheelers are them?”
Mr. Daisy placed the tips of five fingers against his breastbone and bowed till he was shaped like a carpenter’s square.
“Mine,” he impressively proclaimed.
“Yours! Where’d ye get ’em?”
“Bought ’em.”
“With what, I’d like to know?”
“Money.”
Manzanita had been silent, watching Falcon the Flunky out of the corners of her eyes. He was chuckling audibly, apparently enjoying hugely the coup of Mr. Daisy. It occurred to the girl that he had refrained from speaking to her or to any one because he did not wish to trespass upon what seemed to be his partner’s great moment. Now he looked straight at Manzanita and smiled at her as he threw a set of creaking new harness from the back of a mule. He looked like anything but a man who knew himself to be guilty of highway robbery. Wing o’ the Crow had turned to Manzanita, and her look was one of significance.
“He—he’s tryin’ to horn in here with them teams and tools,” she whispered. “That’s what he’s had up his sleeve—what he was hintin’ at all along. They’re—they’re dandy, ain’t they? My, we could move dirt! But if he thinks he c’n win me with mules and new harness he’s off his nut. And he bought ’em with money, he said. Didja hear ’im? Where’d he get money to buy that bunch? There’s six thousan’ dollars’ worth o’ prop’ty there, if it’s worth a cent. And—lissen!” She placed her red lips closer to Manzanita’s ear. “Half o’ the gold that was swiped would be worth somewhere between six and seven thousan’, they said.”
Manzanita closed her eyes and nodded, her cheeks a little whiter.
Mr. Daisy was walking toward them, leading a bunch of mules, his big hand filled with tie ropes.
“Ladies,” he said with a sweeping bow, “let me interdoose you to these here tassel tails. Miss Canby, an’ Miss Wing o’ the Crow, this first bunch here is the children o’ Amram—Aaron an’ Moses an’ Miriam. The sons also of Aaron; Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar. They wasn’t named when me ’n’ The Falcon bought ’em.”