And once, when the rock was particularly hard, she happened along and volunteered to turn the drill while Casey used the "double-jack", which I suppose you know is the big hammer that requires two hands to pound the drill while another turns it slightly after each blow, so that the bitted end will chew its way into hard rock.
You aren"t all of you miners, so I will explain further that to drill into rock with a double-jack and steel drill is not sport for greenhorns exactly. The drill-turner needs a lot of faith and a little nerve, because one blow of the double-jack may break a hand clasped just below the head of the drill. And the man with the double-jack needs a steady nerve, too, and some experience in swinging the big hammer true to the head of the drill,--unless he enjoys cracking another man"s bones.
Casey Ryan prides himself upon being able to swing a double-jack as well as any man in the country. It is his boast that he never yet broke the skin on the hand of his drill-turner. So I shall have to let you take it for granted that the Little Woman"s presence and help was more unnerving than a wildcat on Casey"s back. For, while the first, second and third blows fell true on the drill, the fourth went wild. Casey owns that he was in a cold sweat for fear he might hit her. So he did. She was squatted on her heels, steadying one elbow on her knee. The double-jack struck her hand, glanced and landed another blow on her knee; one of those terribly painful blows that take your breath and make you see stars without crippling you permanently.
Casey doesn"t like to talk about it, but once he growled that he did about every d.a.m.n-fool thing he could with a double-jack, except brain her. The Little Woman gave one small scream and went over backward in a faint, and Casey was just about ready to go off and shoot himself.
He took her up in his arms and carried her down to the cabin before she came to. And when she did come to her senses, Babe immediately made matters worse. She was whimpering beside her mother, and when she saw that mamma had waked up, she shrilled consolingly: "It"s going to be all well in a minute. Casey Ryan kissed it des like _that!_ So now it"ll get all well!"
If the Little Woman had wanted to tell Casey what she thought of him, she couldn"t just then, for Casey was halfway to his own camp by the time she glanced around the room, looking for him.
Common humanity drove him back, of course. He couldn"t let a woman and a child starve to death just because he was a d.a.m.ned idiot and had half-killed the woman. But if there had been another person within calling distance, the Little Woman would probably never have seen Casey Ryan again.
Necessity has a bland way of ignoring such things as conventions and the human emotions. Casey cooked supper for Babe and the Little Woman, and washed the dishes, and wrung out cloths from hot vinegar and salt so that the Little Woman could bathe her knee--she had to do it left-handed, at that--and unb.u.t.toned Babe"s clothes and helped her on with her pyjamas and let her kneel on his lap while she said her prayers. Because, as Babe painstakingly explained, she always kneeled on a lap so ants couldn"t run over her toes and tickle her and make her laugh, which would make G.o.d think she was a bad, naughty girl.
Can you picture Casey Ryan rocking that child to sleep? I can"t--yes, I can too, and there"s something in the picture that holds back the laugh you think will come.
Before she gave her final wriggle and cheeped her last little cheep, Babe had to be carried over and held down where she could kiss mamma good night. Casey got rather white around the mouth, then. But he didn"t say a word. Indeed, he had said mighty little since that fourth blow of the double-jack; just enough to get along intelligently, with what he had to do. He hadn"t even told the Little Woman he was sorry.
So Babe was asleep and tucked in her bed, and Casey turned down the light and asked perfunctorily if there was anything else he could do, and had started for the door. And then--
"Casey Ryan," called the Little Woman, with the teasing note in her voice.
"Casey Ryan, come back here and listen to me. You are not going off like that to swear at yourself all night. Sit down in that chair and listen to me!"
Casey sat down, swallowing hard. All the Casey Ryan nonchalance was gone,--never had been with him, in fact, while he faced that Little Woman.
Somehow she had struck him humble and dumb, from the very beginning. I wish I knew how she did it; I"d like to try it sometime myself.
"Casey Ryan, it"s hard for a woman to own herself in the wrong, especially to a man," she said, when he had begun to squirm and wonder what biting words she would say. "I"ve always thought that I had as good nerve as any one. I have, usually. But that double-jack scared the life out of me after the first blow, and I thought I wouldn"t let on. I couldn"t admit I was afraid. I was terribly ashamed. I knew you"d never miss, but I was scared, just the same. And like a darn fool I pushed the drill away from me just as you struck. It was coming down--you couldn"t change it, man alive.
You"d aimed true at the drill, and--the drill wasn"t just there at the moment. Serves me right. But it"s tough on you, old boy--having to do the cooking for three of us while I"m laid up!"
I"m sure I can"t see how Casey Ryan ever got the name of being a devil with the ladies. He certainly behaved like a yap then, if you get my meaning. He gave the Little Woman a quick, unwinking stare, looked away from her shamedly, reached for his plug of tobacco, took away his hand, swallowed twice, shuffled his feet and then grunted--I can use no other word for it:
"Aw, I guess I c"n stand it if you can!"
He made a motion then to rise up and go to his own camp where he would undoubtedly think of many tender, witty things that he would like to have spoken to the Little Woman. But she was watching him. She saw him move and stopped him with a question.
"Casey Ryan, tell me the truth about that tunnel. Do you think it"s ever going to strike the ore body at all?"
Start Casey off on the subject of mining and you have him anch.o.r.ed and interested for an hour, at least. The Little Woman had brains, you must see that.
"Well, I don"t want to discourage you, ma"am," Casey said reluctantly, the truth crowding against his teeth. "But I"d "a" gone in under that iron capping, if I"d been doing it. The outcropping you followed in from the surface never has been in place, ma"am. It"s what I"d call a wild stringer. It pinched out forty foot back of where we"re diggin" now.
That"s just an iron stain we"re following, and the pocket of high grade don"t mean nothin". You went in on the strength of indications--" He stopped there and chuckled to himself, in a way that I"d come to know as the "indications" of a story,--which usually followed.
The Little Woman probably guessed. I suppose she was lonely, too, and the pain of her hurts made her want entertainment. "What are you laughing at, Casey Ryan?" she demanded. "If it"s funny, tell _me."_
Casey blushed, though she couldn"t have seen him in the dusky light of the cabin. "Aw, it ain"t anything much," he protested bashfully. "I just happened to think about a little ol" Frenchman I knowed once, over in Cripple Creek, ma"am." He stopped.
"Well? Tell me about the little ol" Frenchman. It made you laugh, Casey Ryan, and it"s about the first time I"ve seen you do that. Tell me."
"Well, it ain"t nothin" very funny to tell about," Casey hedged like a bashful boy; which was mighty queer for Casey Ryan, I a.s.sure you. For if there was anything Casey liked better than a funny story, it was some one to listen while he told it. "You won"t git the kick, mebby. It"s knowin"
the Frenchman makes it seem kinda funny when I think about it. He was a good little man and he kept a little hotel and was an awful good cook. And he wanted a gold mine worse than anybody I ever seen. He didn"t know a da--nothin" at all about minin" ma"am, but every ol" soak of a prospector could git a meal off him by tellin" him about some wildcat bonanza or other. He"d forgit to charge "em, he"d be so busy listenin".
"Well, there was two ol" soaks that got around him to grubstake "em. They worked it all one year. They"d git a burro load of grub and go out somewheres and peck around till it was all et up, and then they"d come back an" tell Frenchy some wild tale about runnin" acrost what looked like the richest prospect in the country. They"d go on about havin" all the indications of a big body uh rich ore. He"d soak it in, an" they"d hang around town--one had a sore foot one time, I remember, that lasted "em a month of good board at Frenchy"s hotel before he drove "em out agin to his mine, as he called it.
"They worked that scheme on him for a long time--and it was the only da-- scheme they wasn"t too lazy to work. They"d git money to buy powder an"
fuse an" caps, ma"am, an" blow it on booze, y"see. An" they"d hang in town, boardin" off Frenchy, jest as long as they c"ld think of an excuse fer stayin".
"So somebody tipped Frenchy off that he was bein" worked for grub an"
booze money, an" Frenchy done a lot uh thinkin". Next time them two come in, he was mighty nice to "em. An" when he finally got "em pried loose an" headed out, he appeared suddenly and says he"s goin along to take a look at his mine. They couldn"t do nothin" but take him, uh course. So they led him out to an old location hole somebody else had dug, an" they showed him iron cappin" an" granite contact an" so on--just talkin" wild, an" every few minutes comin" in with the "strong indications of a rich ore body." That was their trump suit, y"see, ma"am.
"Frenchy listened, an" his eyes commenced to snap, but he never said nothin" for awhile. Then all at once he pulled one uh these ol"-style revolvers an" points it at "em, an" yells: _"Indicaziones! Indicaziones!_ T"ell weez your _indicaziones!_ Now you show me zee me-_tall_!"" Casey stopped, reached for his plug and remembered that he mustn"t. The Little Woman laughed. She didn"t seem to need the tapering off of the story, as most women demand.
"And so you think I have plenty of _indicaziones_, but mighty little chance of getting the me-_tall_," she pointed the moral. "Well, then tell me what to do."
It was in the telling, I think, that Casey for the first time forgot to be shy and became his real, Casey Ryan best. The Little Woman saw at once, when he pointed it out to her, that she ought to drift and cut under the iron capping instead of tunnelling away from it as they had been doing.
But she was not altogether engrossed in that tunnel. I think her prospecting into the soul of Casey Ryan interested her much more; and being a woman she followed the small outcropping of his Irish humor and opened up a distinct vein of it before the evening was over. Just to convince you, she led him on until Casey told her all about feeding his Ford syrup instead of oil, and all about how it ran over him a few times on the dry lake,--Casey was secretly made happy because she saw at once how easily that could happen, and never once doubted that he was sober!
He told her about the goats in Patmos and made her laugh so hard that Babe woke and whimpered a little, and insisted that Casey take her up and rock her again in the old homemade chair with crooked juniper branches hewn for rockers.
With Babe in his arms he told her, too, about his coming out to hunt the Injun Jim mine. He must have felt pretty well acquainted, by then, because he regaled her with a painstaking, Caseyish description of Lucy Lily and her educated wardrobe, and--because she was a murderous kind of squaw and ent.i.tled to no particular chivalry--even repeated her manner of proposing to a white man, and her avowed reason and all. That was going pretty far, I think, for one evening, but we must keep in mind the fact that Casey and the Little Woman had met almost a month before this, and that Casey had merely thrown wide open the little door to his real self.
At any rate it was after ten o"clock by Casey"s Ingersoll when he tucked Babe into her little bed, brought a jelly gla.s.s of cold water for the Little Woman to drink in the night, and started for the door.
There he stopped for a minute, debated with his shyness and turned back.
"You mebby moved that steel at the wrong time," he said abruptly, "I guess you musta, the way it happened. But I was so scared I"d hit yuh, my teeth was playin" the dance to _La Paloma_. I was in a cold sweat. I never did hit a man with a double-jack in my life, and I guess I"ve put down ten miles uh holes, ma"am, if you placed "em end to end. I always made it my brag I never sc.r.a.ped a knuckle at that game. But--them little hands of yours on the drill--I was shakin" all over for fear I might--hurt yuh. I-- I never hated anything so bad in my life--I"d ruther kill a dozen men than hurt you--"
"Man alive," the Little Woman exclaimed softly from her dusky corner, "you"d never have hurt me in the world, if I"d had the nerve to trust you." And she added softly, "I"ll trust you, from now on, Casey Ryan.
Always."
I think Casey was an awful fool to walk out and never let her know that he heard that "Always."
CHAPTER XXI
"Casey Ryan," the Little Woman began with her usual abruptness one evening, when she was able to walk as far as the mine and back without feeling; the effect of the exercise, but was still nursing a bandaged right hand; "Casey Ryan, tell me again just what old Injun Jim looked like."
Casey laughed and shifted Babe to a more secure perch on his shoulder, and drew his head to one side in an effort to slacken Babe"s terrific pull on his hair. "Him? Mean an" ornery as the meanest thing you can think of.
Sour as a dough can you"ve went off an" left for a coupla weeks in July."
"Oh, yes; very explicit, I admit. But just what did he look like? Height, weight, age and chief characteristics. I have," she explained, "a very-good reason for wanting a description of him."
"What yuh want a description of him for? He"s good an" dead now." You see, Casey had reached the point of intimacy where he could argue with the Little Woman quite in his everyday Irish spirit of contention.
The Little Woman had spirit of her own, but she was surprisingly meek with Casey at times. "It struck me quite suddenly, to-day, that I may know where that gold mine is; or about where it is," she said, with a hidden excitement in her voice. "I"ve been thinking all day about it, and putting two and two together. I merely need a fair description now of Injun Jim, to feel tolerably certain that I do or do not know something about the location of that mine."