"Come and get it or I"ll throw it out!"
Stanley came back from a brisk toilet at Ironspring. He took a preliminary sip of coffee, speared a juicy steak, and eyed his companion darkly. Mr. Johnson plied knife and fork a.s.siduously, with eyes downcast and demure.
Stanley Mitch.e.l.l"s smooth young face lined with suspicion.
"When you"ve been up to some deviltry I can always tell it on you--you look so incredibly meek and meechin", like a cat eatin" the canary," he remarked severely. "Thank you for a biscuit. And the sugar! Now what warlockry is this?" He jerked a thumb at the far-off fires. "What"s the merry prank?"
Mr. Johnson sighed again.
"Deception. Treachery. Mine." He looked out across the desert to the Gavilan Hills with a complacent eye. "And breach of trust. Mine, again."
"Who you been betrayin" now?"
"Just you. You and your pardner; the last bein" myself. You know them location papers of ours I was to get recorded at Tucson?"
Stanley nodded.
"Well, now," said Pete, "I didn"t file them papers. Something real curious happened on the way in--and I reckon I"m the most superst.i.tious man you ever see. So I tried a little experiment. Instead, I wrote out a notice for that little old ledge we found over on the Gavilan a month back. I filed that, just to see if any one was keeping cases on us--and I filed it the very last thing before I left Tucson: You see what"s happened." He waved his empty coffee-cup at the campfires. "I come right back and we rode straight to Ironspring. But there"s been people ridin" faster than us--ridin" day and night. Son, if our copper claims had really been in the Gavilan, instead of a-hundred-and-then-some long miles in another-guess direction--then what?"
"We"d have found our claim jumped and a bunch to swear they"d been working there before the date of our notices; that they didn"t find the scratch of a pick on the claim, no papers and no monument--that"s what we"d have found."
"Correct! Pa.s.s the meat."
"But we haven"t told a soul," protested Stanley. "How could any one know?
We all but died of thirst getting back across the desert--the wind rubbed out our tracks; we laid up at Soledad Springs a week before any one saw us; when we finally went in to Cobre no one knew where we had been, that we had found anything, or even that we"d been looking for anything. How could any one know?"
"This breakfast is getting cold," said Pete Johnson. "Good grub hurts no one. Let"s eat it. Then I"ll let a little ray of intelligence filter into your darkened mind."
Breakfast finished, Stan piled the tin dishes with a clatter. "Now then, old Greedy! Break the news to me."
Pete considered young Stan through half-closed lids--a tanned, smooth-faced, laughing, curly-headed, broad-shouldered young giant.
"You got any enemies, pardner?"
"Not one in the world that I know of," declared Stan cheerfully.
"Back in New York, maybe?"
"Not a one. No reason to have one."
Pete shook his head reflectively.
"You"re dreadful dumb, you know. Think again. Think hard. Take some one"s girl away from him, maybe?"
"Not a girl. Never had but one Annie," said Stanley. "I"m her Joe."
"Ya-as. Back in New York. I"ve posted letters to her: Abingdon P.O. Name of Selden."
Stanley went brick red.
"That"s her. I"m her Joe. And when we get this little old bonanza of ours to grinding she won"t be in New York any more. Come again, old-timer.
What"s all this piffle got to do with our mine?"
"If you only had a little brains," sighed Johnson disconsolately, "I"d soon find out who had it in for you, and why. It"s dreadful inconvenient to have a pardner like that. Why, you poor, credulous baa-lamb of a trustful idiot, when you let me go off to file them papers, don"t you see you give me the chance to rob you of a mine worth, just as she stands, "most any amount of money you chance to mention? Not you! You let me ride off without a misgivin"."
"Pish!" remarked Stan scornfully. "Twaddle! Tommyrot! Pickles!"
Pete wagged a solemn forefinger.
"If you wasn"t plumb simple-minded and trustin" you would "a" tumbled long ago that somebody was putting a hoodoo on every play you make. I caught on before you"d been here six months. I thought, of course, you"d been doin" dirt to some one--till I come to know you."
"I thank you for those kind words," grinned Mitch.e.l.l; "also, for the friendly explanation with which you cover up some bad luck and more greenhorn"s incompetence."
"No greenhorn could be so thumbhandsided as all that," rejoined Pete earnestly. "Your irrigation ditches break and wash out; cattle get into your crops whenever you go to town; but your fences never break when you"re round the ranch. Notice that?"
"I did observe something of that nature," confessed Mitch.e.l.l. "I laid it to sheer bad luck."
The older man snorted.
"Bad luck! You"ve been hoodooed! After that, you went off by your lonesome and tried cattle. Your windmills broke down; your cattle was stole plumb opprobrious--Mexicans blamed, of course. And the very first winter the sheep drifted in on you--where no sheep had never blatted before--and eat you out of house and home."
"I sold out in the spring," reflected Stanley. "I ran two hundred head of stock up to one hundred and twelve in six months. Go on! Your story interests me, strangely. I begin to think I was not as big a fool as I thought I was, and that it was foolish of me to ever think my folly was--"
Johnson interrupted him.
"Then you bought a bunch of sheep. Son, you can"t realize how great-minded it is of me to overlook that slip of yours! You was out of the way of every man in the world; you was on your own range, watering at your own wells--the only case like that on record. And the second dark night some petulant and highly anonymous cowboys run off your herder and stampeded your woollies over a bluff."
"Sheep outrages have happened before," observed Stan, rather dryly.
"Sheep outrages are perpetrated by cowmen on cow ranges," rejoined Pete hotly. "I guess I ought to know. Sheepmen aren"t ever killed on their own ranges; it isn"t respectable. Sheepmen are all right in their place--and h.e.l.l"s the place."
"Peter!" said Stan. "Such langwidge!"
"Wallop! Wallop!" barked Peter, defiant and indignant. "I will say wallop! Now you shut up whilst I go on with your sad history. Son, you was afflicted some with five-card insomnia--and right off, when you first came, you had it fair shoved on you by people usually most disobligin".
It wasn"t just for your money; there was plenty could stack "em higher than you could, and them fairly achin" to be fleeced, at that. If your head hadn"t been attached to your shoulders good and strong, if you hadn"t figured to be about square, or maybe rectangular, you had a chance to be a poker fiend or a booze hoist."
"You"re spoofing me, old dear. Wake up; it"s morning."
"Don"t fool yourself, son. There was a steady organized effort to get you in bad. And it took money to get all these people after your goat. Some one round here was managin" the game, for pay. But"t wasn"t no Arizona head that did the plannin". Any Rocky Mountain roughneck mean enough for that would "a" just killed you once and been done with it. No, sir; this party was plumb civilized--this guy that wanted your goat. He wanted to spoil your rep; he probably had conscientious scruples about bloodshed.
Early trainin"," said Mr. Johnson admiringly, "is a wonderful thing! And, after they found you wouldn"t fall for the husks and things, they went out to put a crimp in your bank roll. Now, who is to gain by putting you on the blink, huh?"
"No one at all," said Stan. "You"re seein" things at night! What happened on the Cobre Trail to stir up your superst.i.tions?"
"Two gay young lads--punchers of Zurich"s--tried to catch me with my gun unloaded. That"s what! And if herdin" with them blasted baa-sheep hadn"t just about ruined your intellect, you"d know why, without asking," said Pete. "Look now! I was so sure that you was bein" systematically hornswoggled that, when two rank strangers made that sort of a ranikiboo play at me, I talked it out with myself, like this--not out loud--just me and Pete colloguing:
""These gentlemen are pickin" on you, Pete. What"s that for?" "Why,"
says Pete, "that"s because you"re Stan"s pardner, of course. These two laddie-bucks are some small part of the gang, bunch, or congregation that"s been preyin" on Stan." "What they tryin" to put over on Stan now?"
I asks, curiosity getting the better of my good manners. "Not to pry into private matters any," says I, "but this thing is getting personal. I can feel malicious animal magnetism coursin" through every vein and leapin"