Nan of Music Mountain. Spearman Frank Hamilton
really mad, and had the sorry distinction of being the first person to be put in the insane asylum at Bear Dance. It had never occurred to him that any one had any title to, or that any madder man would lay any claim to, so accursed a spot as Calabasas. But old Duke Morgan announced in due time that the hotel was built on Morgan land, and belonged to the Morgans. Nobody outside a madhouse could be found to dispute with Duke Morgan a title to land within ten miles of Morgan’s Gap, and none but a lunatic would attempt to run a hotel at Calabasas, anyway. However, a solution of the difficulty was found: Duke’s colorable title gave the cue to his retainers in the Gap, and in time they carted away piecemeal most of the main building, leaving for years the kitchen and the servants’ quarters adjoining it to owls, lizards, scorpions, and spiders.
Meantime, to tap the fast-developing gold-fields, the freight route and stages had been put in, and the barns built at Calabasas. A need naturally developed for at least one feature of a hotel–a barroom. A newer lunatic answered the call of civilization–a man only mildly insane stocked the kitchen range with liquors, and fitted up in a crude way the ice-boxes–where there never was ice–serving pantries, and other odd nooks for sleeping quarters. Here the thirsty stage passenger, little suspecting the origin of the facilities offered him for a drink, may choose strong drink instead of water–or rather, he is restricted to strong drink where water might once have been had–the spring being piped now half a mile to the barns for the horses. And this shack, as it is locally called, run by a Mexican, is still the inn at Calabasas. And it continues to contribute, through its stirring annals, to the tragic history of the continental divide.
It need hardly be said that Duke Morgan laid claim also to the Calabasas Spring. But on this the company, being a corporation, fought him. And after somewhat less of argument and somewhat more of siege and shooting, a compromise was reached whereby the company bought annually at an exorbitant price all of Duke, Satterlee, and Vance Morgan’s hay, and as the Morgans had small rivers of water in the mountains, and never, except when crowded, drank water, a modus vivendi was arranged between the claimants. The only sufferer through this was the Mexican publican, who found every Morgan his landlord, and demanding from him tithes over the bar. But force is usually met with cunning, and such Morgans as would not pay in advance at Calabasas, when thirsty, often found the half-mad publican out of goods.
The Calabasas Inn stood in one of the loneliest canyons of the whole seventy miles between Sleepy Cat and Thief River; it looked in its depletion to be what it was, a sombre, mysterious, sun, wind, and alkali beaten pile, around which no one by any chance ever saw a sign of life. It was a ruin like those pretentious deserted structures sometimes seen in frontier towns–relics of the wide-open days, which stand afterward, stark and sombre, to serve as bats’ nests or blind-pigs. The inn at Calabasas looked its part–a haunt of rustlers, a haven of nameless men, a refuge of road-agents.
The very first time de Spain made an inspection trip over the stage line with Lefever, he was conscious of the sinister air of this lonely building. He and Lefever had ridden down from the barn, while their horses were being changed, to look at the place. De Spain wanted to look over everything connected in any way, however remotely, with the operation of his wagons, and this joint, Lefever had told him, was where the freighters and drivers were not infrequently robbed of their money. It was here that one of their own men, Bill McCarty, once “scratched a man’s neck” with a knife–which, Bill explained, he just “happened” to have in his hand–for cheating at cards. Lefever pointed out the unlucky gambler’s grave as he and de Spain rode into the canyon toward the inn.
Not a sign of any sort was displayed about the habitation. No man was invited to enter, no man warned to keep out, none was anywhere in sight. The stage men dismounted, threw their lines, pushed open the front door of the house and entered a room of perhaps sixteen by twenty feet. It had been the original barroom. A long, high, elaborately carved mahogany bar, as much out of keeping as it possibly could be with its surroundings, stretched across the farther side of the room. The left end, as they faced the bar, was brought around to escape a small window opening on a court or patio to the rear of the room. Back of the bar itself, about midway, a low door in the bare wall gave entrance to a rear room. Aside from this big, queer-looking piece of mahogany, the low window at the left end of it, and the low door at the back, the room presented nothing but walls. Two windows flanking the front door helped to light it, but not a mirror, picture, chair, table, bottle, or glass was to be seen. De Spain covered every feature of the interior at a glance. “Quiet around here, John,” he remarked casually.
“This is the quietest place in the Rocky Mountains most of the time. But when it is noisy, believe me, it is noisy. Look at the bullet-holes in the walls.”
“The old story,” remarked de Spain, inspecting with mild-mannered interest the punctured plastering, “they always shoot high.”
He walked over to the left end of the bar, noting the hard usage shown by the ornate mahogany, and spreading his hands wide open, palms down, on the face of it, glanced at the low window on his left, opening on the gravelled patio. He peered, in the semidarkness, at the battered door behind the bar.
“Henry,” observed Lefever, “if you are looking for a drink, it would only be fair, as well as politic, to call the Mexican.”
“Thank you, John, I’m not looking for one. And I know you don’t drink.”
“You want to know, then, where the Mexican keeps his gun?” hazarded Lefever.
“Not especially. I just want to know–”
“Everything.”
“What’s behind the bar. That’s natural, isn’t it?”
Very complete fittings and compartments told of the labor spent in preparing this inner side for the convenience of the bartender and the requirements of exacting patrons, but nothing in the way of equipment, not so much as a pewter spoon, lay anywhere visible.
De Spain, turning, looked all around the room again. “You wouldn’t think,” he said slowly, “from looking at the place there was a road-agent within a thousand miles.”
“You wouldn’t think, from riding through the Superstition Mountains there was a lion within a thousand miles. I’ve hunted them for eleven years, and I never saw one except when the dogs drove ’em out; but for eleven years they saw me. If we haven’t been seen coming in here by some of this Calabasas bunch, I miss my guess,” declared Lefever cheerfully.
The batten door behind the bar now began to open slowly and noiselessly. Lefever peered through it. “Come in, Pedro,” he cried reassuringly, “come in, man. This is no officer, no revenue agent looking for your license. Meet a friend, Pedro,” he continued encouragingly, as the swarthy publican, low-browed and sullen, emerged very deliberately from the inner darkness into the obscurity of the barroom, and bent his one good eye searchingly on de Spain. “This,” Lefever’s left hand lay familiarly on the back of de Spain’s shoulder, “is our new manager, Mr. Henry de Spain. Henry, shake hands with Mexico.”
This invitation to shake hands seemed an empty formality. De Spain never shook hands with anybody; at least if he did so, he extended, through habit long inured, his left hand, with an excuse for the soreness of his right. Pedro did not even bat his remaining eye at the invitation. The situation, as Lefever facetiously remarked, remained about where it was before he spoke, and nothing daunted, he asked de Spain what he would drink. De Spain sidestepped again by asking for a cigar. Lefever, professing he would not drink alone, called for cigarettes. While Pedro produced them, from nowhere apparently, as a conjurer picks cards out of the air, the sound of galloping horses came through the open door. A moment later three men walked, single file, into the room. De Spain stood at the left end of the bar, and Lefever introduced him to Gale Morgan, to David Sassoon, and to Sassoon’s crony, Deaf Sandusky, as the new stage-line manager. The later arrivals lined up before the bar, Sandusky next to Lefever and de Spain, so he could hear what was said. Pedro from his den produced two queer-looking bottles and a supply of glasses.
“De Spain,” Gale Morgan began bluntly, “one of our men was put off a stage of yours last week by Frank Elpaso.” He spoke without any preliminary compliments, and his heavy voice was bellicose.
De Spain, regarding him undisturbed,