Casey Ryan Page 12

  CHAPTER XII

  "Look there!" Casey rose from the ground where he had been sitting withhis hands clasped round his drawn-up knees. He pointed with his pipe to amountain side twelve miles away but looking five, even in the gloom ofearly dusk. "Look at that, will yuh! Whadda yuh say that is, just makin' aguess? A fire, mebby?"

  "Camp fire. Some prospector boiling coffee in a dirty lard bucket, maybe."

  Casey snorted. "It's a darn big fire to boil a pot uh coffee! Recollect,it's twelve miles over to that mountain. A bonfire a mile off wouldn'tlook any bigger than that. Would it now?" His tone was a challenge to mytruthfulness.

  "Wel-l, I guess it wouldn't, come to think of it."

  "Guess? You know darn well it wouldn't. You watch that there fire. I ain'tover there--but if that ain't the devil's lantern, I'll walk on my handsfrom here over there an' find out for yuh."

  "I'd have to go over there myself to discover whether you're right orwrong. But if a fellow can trust his eyes, Casey--"

  "Well, you can't," Casey said grimly, still standing, his eyes fixed uponthe distant light. "Not here in this country, you can't. You ask anybody.You don't trust your eyes when yuh come to a dry lake an' you see water,an' the bushes around the shore reflected in the water, an' mebby a boatout in the middle. _Do_ yuh? You don't trust your eyes when you look atthem hills. They look close enough to walk over to 'em in half or threequarters of an hour. _Don't_ they? An' didn't I take yuh in my Fordauto-_mo_-bile, an' wasn't it twelve? An' d'yuh trust your eyes when yuhlook up, an' it looks like you could knock stars down with a tent pole,like yuh knock apples off'n trees? Sure, you can't trust your eyes! Whenyuh hit the desert, oletimer, yuh pack two of the biggest liars on earthright under your eyebrows." He chuckled at that. "An' most folks packanother one under their noses, fer luck. Now lookit over there! Prospectornothin'. It's the devil out walkin' an' packin' a lantern. He's mebbyfound some shin bones an' a rib or two an' mebby a chewed boot, an' hestopped there to have his little laugh. Lemme tell yuh. You mark wherethat fire is. An' t'-morra, if yuh like, I'll take yuh over there. If youc'n find a track er embers on that slope--Gawsh!"

  We both stood staring; while he talked, the light had blinked out likesnapping an electric switch. And that was strange because camp fires takea little time in the dying. I stepped inside the tent, fumbled for thefield glasses and came out, adjusting the night focus. Casey's squat,powerful form stood perfectly still where I had left him, his face turnedtoward the mountain. There was no fire on the slope. Beyond, hanging blackin the sky, a thunder cloud pillowed up toward the peak of the mountain,pushing out now and then to blot a star from the purple. Now and then awhite, ragged gash cut through, but no sound reached up to where we werecamped on the high mesa that was the lap of Starvation Mountain. I willexplain that Casey had come back to Starvation to see if there were notanother good silver claim lying loose and needing a location monument. Wefaced Tippipah Range twelve miles away,--and to-night the fire on itsslope.

  "Lightning struck a yucca over there and burned it, probably," I hazarded,seeking the spot through the glasses.

  "Yeah--only there ain't no yuccas on that slope. That's a limestone ledgeformation an' there ain't enough soil to cover up a t'rantler. And thestorm's over back of the Tippipahs anyhow. It ain't on 'em."

  "It's burning up again--"

  "Hit another yucca, mebby!"

  "It looks--" I adjusted the lenses carefully "--like a fire, all right.There's a reddish cast. I can't see any flames, exactly, but--" I supposeI gave a gasp, for Casey laughed outright.

  "No, I guess yuh can't. Flames don't travel like that--huh?"

  The light had moved suddenly, so that it seemed to jump clean away fromthe field of vision embraced by the glasses. I had a little trouble inpicking it up again. I had to take down the glasses and look; and then Ileft them down and watched the light with my naked, lying eyes. They didlie; they must have. They said that a camp fire had abruptly picked itselfup bodily and was slipping rapidly as a speeding automobile up a barewhite slide of rock so steep that a mountain goat would give one glanceand hunt up an easier trail. All my life I have had intimate acquaintancewith camp fires; I have eaten with them, slept with them, coaxed them instorm, watched them from afar. I thought I knew all their tricks, alltheir treacheries. I have seen apparently cold ashes blow red quiteunexpectedly and fire grass and bushes and go racing away,--I have foughtthem then with whatever came to hand.

  I admit that an odd, prickly sensation at the base of my scalp annoyed mewhile I watched this fire race up the slope and leave no red trail behindit. Then it disappeared, blinked out again. I opened my mouth to callCasey's attention to it--though I felt that he was watching it with thatsteady, squinting stare of his that never seems to wink or waver for asecond--but there it was again, come to a stop just under the crest of themountain where the white slide was topped by a black rim capped withbleak, bare rock like a crude skullcap on Tippipah. The fire flared,dimmed, burned bright again, as though some one had piled on dry brush. Icaught up the glasses and watched the light for a full minute. They weregood glasses,--I ought to have seen the flicker of flames; but I did not.Just the reddish yellow glow and no more.

  "Must be fox fire," I said, feeling impatient because that did not satisfyme at all, but having no other explanation that I could think of handy."I've seen wonderful exhibitions of it in low, swampy ground--"

  Casey spat into the dark. "I never heard of nobody boggin' down, up thereon Tippipah." He put his cold pipe in his mouth, removed it and gesturedwith it toward the light. "I've seen jack-o'-lanterns myself. You knowdarn well that ain't it; not up on them rocks, dry as a bone. A minute agoyou said it was lightnin' burnin' a yucca. Why don't yuh come out in theopen, an' say you don't _know_? Mebby you'll come closer to believin' whatI told yuh about that devil's lantern I follered. He's lit another one--kinda hopin' we'll be fool enough to fall for it. You come inside whereyuh can't watch it. That's what does the damage--watchin' and wonderin'and then goin' to see. I bet you wanta strike out right now and see justwhat it is."

  I didn't admit it, but Casey had guessed exactly what was in my mind. Iwas itching with curiosity and trying to ignore the creepiness of it.Casey went into the tent and lighted the candle and proceeded to unlacehis high hiking boots. "You come on in and go to bed. Don't yuh pay noattention to that light--that's what the Old Boy plays for first, everytime; workin' your curiosity up. You ask anybody. He played me fer asucker and I told yuh about it, and yuh thought Casey was stringin' yuh.Well, I can take a joke from the devil himself and never let out a yip--but once is enough for Casey! I'm goin' to bed. Let him set out there andhold his darn lantern and be damned; he ain't going to make nothin' off'nCasey Ryan this time. You can ask anybody if Casey Ryan bites twice on thesame hook."

  He got into bed and turned his face to the wall with a finality I couldnot ignore. I let it go at that, but twice I got up and went outside tolook. There burned the light, diabolically like a signal fire on the peak,where no fire should be. I began to seek explanations, but the best ofthem were vague. Electricity playing a prank of some obscure kind,--thatwas as close as I could get to it, and even that did not satisfy as itshould have done, perhaps because the high, barren mesas and the mountainsof bare rocks are in themselves weird and sinister, and commonplaceexplanations of their phenomena seem out of place.

  The land is empty of men, emptier still of habitations. There are not manyanimals, even. A few coyotes, all of them under suspicion of havingrabies; venomous things such as tarantulas and centipedes, scorpions,rattlers, hydrophobia skunks. Not so many of them that they are a constantmenace, but occasionally to be reckoned with. Great sprawling dry lakesominous in their very placidity; dust dry, with little whirlwindsscurrying over them and mirages that lie to you most convincingly,painting water where there is only clay dust. Water that is hidden deep inforbidding canyons, water that you must hunt for blindly unless you havebeen told where it comes stealthily out from some crevice in the rocks
.Indians know the water holes, and have told the white men with whom theymade friends after a fashion--for Casey tells me he never knew a red manwho was essentially noble--and these have told others; and men have namedthe springs and have indicated their location on maps. Otherwise the landis dry, parched and deadly and beautiful, and men have died terrible,picturesque deaths within its borders.

  I was thinking of that, and it seemed not too incongruous that the devilshould now and then walk abroad with a lantern of his own devising to makemen shrink from his path. But Casey says, and I think he means it, thatthe light is a lure. He told me a weird adventure of his own to back hisargument, but I thought he was inventing most of it as he went along.Until I saw that light on Tippipah I had determined to let his romancinggo in at one ear if it must, and stop there without running out at thetips of my fingers. Casey has enough ungodly adventures that are true. Ididn't feel called upon to repeat his Irish inventions.

  But now I'm going to tell you. If you can't believe it I shall not blameyou; but Casey swears that it is all true. It's worth beginning whereCasey did, at the beginning. And that goes back to when he was drivingstage in the Yellowstone.

  Casey was making the trip out, one time, and he had just one passengerbecause it was at the end of the season and there had been a week of nastyweather that had driven out most of the sightseers and no new ones werecoming in. This man was a peevish, egotistical sort, I imagine; at anyrate he did a lot of talking about himself and his ill luck, and he toldCasey of his misfortunes by the hour.

  Casey did not mind that much. He says he didn't listen half the time. Butfinally the fellow began talking of the wealth that is wasted on folks whocan't use it properly or even appreciate the good fortune.

  To illustrate that point he told a story that set Casey's mind to seeingvisions. The man told about an old Indian who lived in dirt and agovernment blanket and drank bad whisky when he could get it, and whippedhis squaw and behaved exactly like other Indians. Yet that old Indian knewwhere gold lay so thick that he could pick out pieces of crumbly rock allplastered with free gold. He was too lazy to dig out enough to do him anygood. He would come into the nearest town with a rusty old lard bucketfull of high grade so rich that the storekeeper once got five hundreddollars from the bucketful. He gave the Indian about twenty dollars' worthof grub and made him a present of two yards of bright blue ribbon, whichtickled the old buck so much that in two weeks he was back with more highgrade knotted in the bottom of a gunny sack.

  Casey asked the man why some one didn't trail the Injun. Casey knew thatan Indian is not permitted to file a claim to mineral land. He could nothold it, under the law, if some white man discovered it and located theground, but Casey thought that some white-hearted fellow might take theclaim and pay the buck a certain percentage of the profits.

  The man said that couldn't be done. The old buck--Injun Jim, they calledhim--was an old she-bear. All the Indians were afraid of him and wouldhide their faces in their blankets when he passed them on his way to thegold, rather than be suspected by Injun Jim of any unwarranted interest inhis destination. Casey knew enough about Indians to accept that statement.And white men, it would seem, were either not nervy enough or else theywere not cunning enough. A few had attempted to trail Injun Jim, but noone had ever succeeded, because that part of Nevada had not had any goldstampede, which the man declared would have come sure as fate if InjunJim's mine were ever uncovered.

  Casey asked certain questions and learned all that the man could tellhim,--or would tell him. He said that Injun Jim lived mostly in theTippipah district. No free gold had ever been discovered there, nor muchgold of any kind; but Injun Jim certainly brought free gold into RoundButte whenever he wanted grub. It must have been ungodly rich,--fivehundred dollars' worth in a ten-pound lard bucket!

  The tale held Casey's imagination. He dreamed nights of trailing InjunJim, and if he'd had any money to outfit for the venture he surely wouldhave gone straight to Nevada and to Round Butte. He told himself that itwould take an outsider to furnish the energy for the search. Men who livein a country are the last to see the possibilities lying all around them,Casey said. It was true; he had seen it work out even in himself. Hadn'the driven stage in Cripple Creek country and carried out gold by thehundred-thousand,--gold that might have been his had he not been contentto drive stage? Hadn't he lived in gold country all his life, almost, anddidn't he know mineral formations as well as many a school--trainedexpert?

  But even dreams of gold fluctuate and grow vague before the smallinterests of everyday living. Casey hadn't the money just then to quit hisjob of stage driving and go Indian stalking. It would take money,--a fewhundred at least. Casey at that time lacked the price of a ticket to RoundButte. So he had to drive and dream, and his first spurt of saving grewhalf--hearted as the weeks passed; and then he lost all he had saved in apoker game because he wanted to win enough in one night to make the trip.

  However, he went among men with his ears wide open for gossip concerningInjun Jim, and he gleaned bits of information that seemed to confirm whathis passenger up in the Yellowstone had told him. He even met a man whoknew Injun Jim.

  Injun Jim, he was told, had one eye and a bad temper. He had lost hisright eye in a fight with soldiers, in the days when Indian fighting waspart of a soldier's training. Injun Jim nursed a grudge against the whitesbecause of that eye, and while he behaved himself nowadays, being old andnot very popular amongst his own people, it was taken for granted that histrigger finger would never be paralyzed, and that a white man need onlyfurnish him a thin excuse and a fair chance to cover all traces of thekilling. Injun Jim would attend to the rest with great zeal.

  Stranger still, Casey found that the tale of the lard bucket and the goldwas true. This man had once been in the store when Jim arrived for grub.He had taken a piece of the ore in his hands. It was free gold, all right,and it must have come from a district where free gold was scarce as women.

  "We've got it figured down to a spot about fifty miles square," the mantold Casey. "That old Injun don't travel long trails. He's old. And allInjuns are lazy. They won't go hunting mineral like a white man. They knowmineral when they see it and they have good memories and can go to thespot afterwards. Injun Jim prob-ly run across a pocket somewheres when hewas hunting. Can't be much of it--he'd bring in more at a time if therewas, and be Injun-rich. He's just figurin' on making it hold out long ashe lives. 'Tain't worth while trying to find it; there's too much minerallaying around loose in these hills."

  Casey stored all that gossip away in the back of his head and through allthe ups and downs of the years he never quite forgot it.