The Trail of the White Mule Part 13

Wind and rain and more wind, buffeting that trail since the last car had pa.s.sed, made "heavy going." The Ford labored up small hills and across gullies, dipping downward at last to Juniper Wells; there Casey stopped close beside the blackened embers left by some forgotten traveler of the wild. He slid stiffly from behind the wheel to the vacant seat beside him, and climbed out like the old man he had last night determined never to become. He walked away a few paces, turned and stood glaring back at the car as if familiarizing himself with an object little known and hated much.

Fate, he felt, had played a shabby trick upon an honest man. Here he stood, a criminal in the eyes of the law, a liar in the eyes of the missus. An honest man and a truthful, here he was--he, Casey Ryan--actually afraid to face his fellow men.

"HE wasn't no friend of Bill Masters; the divil himself wouldn'ta owned him fer a friend!" snarled Casey, thinking of Kenner. "Me--CASEY RYAN!--with a load uh booze wished onto me--and a car that may have been stolen fer all I know--an' not a darn' nickel to my name! They can make a goat uh Casey Ryan once, but watch clost when they try it the second time! Casey MAY be gittin' old; he might possibly have softenin' of the brain; but he'll git the skunk that done this, or you'll find his carca.s.s layin' alongside the trail bleachin' like a blowed-out tire! I'll trail 'im till my tongue hangs down to my knees!

I'll git 'im an' I'll drown 'im face down in a bucket of his own booze!" Whipped by emotion, his voice rose stridently until it cracked just under a shout.

"That sounds pretty businesslike, old man," a strange voice spoke whimsically behind Casey. "Who's all this you're going to trail till your tongue hangs down to your knees? Going to need any help?"

Casey whirled belligerently upon the man who had walked quietly up behind him.

"Where the h.e.l.l did YOU come from?" he countered roughly.

"Does it matter? I'm here," the other parried blandly. "But by the way! If you've got the makings of a meal in your car--and you look too old a hand in the desert to be without grub--I won't refuse to have a snack with you. I hate to invite myself to breakfast, but it's that or go hungry--and an empty belly won't stand on ceremony."

The hard-bitten features of Casey Ryan, tanned as they were by wind and sun to a fair imitation of leather, were never meant to portray mixed emotions. His face, therefore, remained impa.s.sive except for a queer, cornered look in his eyes. With a sick feeling at the pit of his stomach he wondered just how much of his impa.s.sioned soliloquy the man had overheard; who and what this man was, and how he had managed to approach within six feet of Casey without being overheard. With a sicker feeling, he wondered if there were any grub in the car; and if so, how he could get at it without revealing his contraband load to this stranger.

But Casey Ryan was nothing if not game. He reached for his trusty plug of tobacco and pried off a corner with his teeth. He lifted his left hand mechanically to the back of his head and pushed his black felt hat forward so that it rested over his right eyebrow at a devil-may-care angle. These preparations made involuntarily and unconsciously, Casey Ryan was himself again.

"All right--if you're willin' to rustle the wood an' start a fire, I'll see if I can dig up somethin'." He c.o.c.ked an eye up at the sun. "I et my breakfast long enough ago so I guess it's settled. I reckon mebby I c'd take on some bacon an' coffee myself. Feller I had along with me I ditched, back here at the railroad. He done the packin' up--an' I'd hate to swear to what he put in an' what he left out. Onery cuss--I wouldn't put nothin' past him. But mebby we can make out a meal."

The stranger seemed perfectly satisfied with this arrangement and studied preamble. He started off to gather dead branches of greasewood; and Casey, having prepared the way for possible disappointment, turned toward the car.

Fear and Casey Ryan have ever been strangers; yet he was conscious of a distinct, p.r.i.c.kly chill down his spine. The glance he cast over his shoulder at the stranger betrayed uneasiness, best he could do. He turned over the roll of bedding and cautiously began a superficial search which he hoped would reveal grub in plenty--without revealing anything else. He wished now that he had taken a look over his shoulder when young Kenner was unloading the car at Smiling Lou's command. He would be better prepared now for possible emergencies. He remembered, with a bit of comfort, that the bootlegger had piled a good deal of stuff upon the ground before Casey first heard the clink of bottles.

A grunt of relief signaled his location of a box containing grub. A moment later he lifted out a gunny sack bulging unevenly with cooking utensils. He fished a little deeper, turned back a folded tarp and laid naked to his eyes the top of a whisky keg. With a grunt of consternation he hastily replaced the tarp, his heart flopping in his chest like a fresh-landed fish.

The stranger was kneeling beside a faintly crackling little pile of twigs, his face turned inquiringly toward Casey. Casey, glancing guiltily over his shoulder, felt the chill hand of discovery reaching for his very soul. It was as if a dead man were hidden away beneath that tarp. It seemed to him that the eyes of the stranger were sharp, suspicious eyes, and that they dwelt upon him altogether too attentively for a perfectly justifiable interest even in the box of grub.

Black coffee, drunk hot and strong, gave the world a brighter aspect.

Casey decided that the situation was not so desperate, after all. Easy enough to bluff it out--easiest thing in the world! He would just go along as if there wasn't a thing on his mind heavier than his thinning, sandy hair. No man living had any right or business snooping around in his car, unless he carried a badge of an officer of the law. Even with the badge, Casey told himself sternly, a man would have to show a warrant before he could touch a finger to his outfit.

Over his third cup of coffee Casey eyed the stranger guardedly. He did not look like an officer. He was not big and burly, with arrogant eyes and the hint of leashed authority in his tone. Instead, he was of medium height, owned a pair of shrewd gray eyes and an easy drawl, and was dressed in the half military style so popular with mining men, surveyors and others who can afford to choose what garb they will adopt for outdoor living.

He had shown a perfect familiarity with cooking over a campfire, and had fried the bacon in a manner which even Casey could not criticize.

Before the coffee was boiled he had told Casey that his name was Mack Nolan. Immediately afterward he had grinned and added the superfluous information that he was Irish and didn't care who knew it.

"Well, I'm Irish, meself," Casey returned approvingly and with more than his usual brogue. "You can ask anybody if Casey Ryan has ever showed shame fer the blood that's in' 'im. 'Tis the Irish that never backs up from a rough trail or a fight." He poured a fourth cup of coffee into a chipped enamel cup and took his courage in his two hands.

Mack Nolan, he a.s.sured himself optimistically, couldn't possibly know what lay hidden under the camp outfit in the Ford. Until he did know, he was harmless as anybody, so long as Casey kept an eye on him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

During the companionable smoke that followed breakfast, Casey learned that Mack Nolan had spent some time in Nevada, ambling through the hills, examining the geologic formation of the country with a view to possible future prospecting in districts yet undeveloped.

"The mineral possibilities of Nevada haven't been more than scratched,"

Mack Nolan observed, lying back with one arm thrown up under his head as a makes.h.i.+ft pillow and the other hand negligently attending to the cigarette he was smoking. His gray army hat was tilted over his eyes, s.h.i.+elding them from the sun while they dwelt rather studiously upon the face of Casey Ryan.

"Every spring I like to get out and poke around through these hills where folks as a rule don't go. Never did much prospecting--as such.

Don't take kindly enough to a pick and shovel for that. What I like best is general field work. If I run across something rich, time enough then to locate a claim or two and hire a couple of strong backs to do the digging.

"I've been out now for about three weeks; and night before last, just as I stopped to make camp and before I'd started to unpack, my two mules got scared at a rattler and quit the country. Left me flat, without a thing but my clothes and six-shooter, and what I had in my pockets." He lifted the cigarette from between his lips--thin, they were, and curved and rather pitiless, one could guess, if the man were sufficiently roused.

"I wasted all yesterday trying to trail 'em. But you can't do much tracking in these rocks back here toward the river. I was. .h.i.tting for the highway to catch a ride if I could, when I saw you topping this last ridge over here. Don't blame me much for b.u.mming a breakfast, do you?" And he added, with a sigh of deep physical content, "It sure-lee was some feed!"

His lids drooped lower as if sleep were overtaking him in spite of himself. "I'd ask yuh if you'd seen anything of those mules--only I don't give a d.a.m.n now. I wish this was night instead of noon; I could sleep the clock around after that bacon and bannock of yours. Haven't a care in the world," he murmured drowsily. "Happy as a toad in the sun, first warm day of spring. How soon you going to crank up?"

Casey stared at him unwinkingly through narrowed lids. He pushed his hat forward with a sharp tilt over his eyebrow--which meant always that Casey Ryan had just O. K.'d an idea--and reached for his chewing tobacco.

"Go ahead an' take a nap if yuh want to," he urged. "I got some tinkerin' to do on the Ford, an' I was aimin' to lay over here an' do it. I'm kinda lookin' around, myself, for a likely prospect; I got all the time there is. I guess I'll back the car down the draw a piece where she'll set level, an' clean up 'er dingbats whilst you take a sleep."

Casey left the breakfast things where they were, as a silent rea.s.surance to Mack Nolan that the car would not go off without him. It was a fine, psychological detail of which Casey was secretly rather proud. A box of grub, a smoked coffee pot and dirty breakfast dishes left beside a dead campfire establishes evidence, admissible before any jury, that the owner means to return.

Casey went over and cranked the Ford, grimly determined to make the coffee pot lie for him if necessary. He backed the car down the draw a good seventy-five yards, to where a wrinkle in the bank hid him from the breakfast camp. He stopped there and left the engine running while he straddled out over the side and went forward to the dip of the front fender to see if the Ford were still visible to Mack Nolan. He was glad to find that by crouching and sighting across the fender he could just see the campfire and the top of Nolan's hat beyond it. The man need only lift his head off his arm to see that the Ford was standing just around the turn of the draw.

"The corner was never yet so tight that Casey Ryan couldn't find a crack somewhere to crawl through," he told himself vaingloriously. "An'

I hope to thunder the feller sleeps long an' sleeps solid!"

For fifteen minutes the mind of Casey Ryan was at ease. He had found a shovel in the car, placed conveniently at the side where it could be used for just such an emergency as this. For fifteen minutes he had been using that shovel in a shelving bank of loose gravel just under an outcropping of rhyolite a rod or so behind the car and well out of sight of Nolan.

He was beginning to consider his excavation almost deep enough to bury two ten-gallon kegs and forty bottles of whisky, when the shadow of a head and shoulders fell across the hole. Casey did not lift the dirt and rocks he had on his shovel. He froze to a tense quiet, goggling at the shadow.

"What are yuh doing, Casey? Trying to outdig a badger?" Mack Nolan's chuckle was friendliness itself.

Casey's head snapped around so that he could c.o.c.k an eye up at Nolan.

He grinned mechanically. "Naw. Picked up a rich-lookin' piece uh float. Thought I'd just see if it didn't mebby come from this ledge."

Mack Nolan stepped forward interestedly and looked at the ledge.

"Where's the piece you found?" he very naturally inquired. "The formation just here wouldn't lead me to expect gold-bearing rock; but of course, anything is possible with gold. Let's have a look at the specimen."

Casey had once tried to bluff a stranger with two deuces and a pair of fives, and two full stacks of blue chips pushed to the center to back the bluff. The stranger had called him, with three queens and a pair of jacks. Casey felt like that now.

He had laughed over his loss then, and he grinned now and reached carelessly to the bank beside him as if he fully expected to lay his hand on the specimen of gold-bearing rock. He went so far as to utter a surprised oath when he failed to find it. He felt in his pockets.

He went forward and scanned the top of the ledge almost convincingly.

He turned and stood a-straddle, his hands on his hips, and gazed on the pile of dirt he had thrown out of the hole. Last, he pushed his hat back so that with the next movement he could push it forward again over his eyebrow.

"Now if that there lump uh high-grade ain't went an' slid down the bank an' got covered up with the muck!" he exclaimed disgustedly. "I'm a son of a gun if Fate ain't playin' agin' Casey Ryan with a flock uh aces under its vest!"

Mack Nolan laughed, and Casey slanted a look his way. "Thought I left you takin, a nap," he said brazenly. "What's the matter? Didn't your breakfast set good?"

Mack Nolan laughed again. It was evident that he found Casey Ryan very amusing.

"The breakfast was fine," he replied easily. "A couple of lizards got to playing tag over me. That woke me up, and the sun was so hot I just thought I'd come down and crawl into the car and go to sleep there. Go ahead with your prospecting, Casey--I won't bother you."

Casey went on with his digging, but his heart was not in it. With every laggard shovelful of dirt, he glanced over his shoulder apprehensively, watching Mack Nolan crawl into the back of the car and settle himself, with an audible sigh of satisfaction, on top of the load. He had one wild, wicked impulse to lengthen the hole and make it serve as a grave for more than bootleg whisky; but it was an impulse born of desperation, and it died almost before it had lived.