The Trail of the White Mule & Casey Ryan (Western Adventure Classics). B. M. Bower
to his own car or to the car that had unluckily met him without warning. For Casey, I must tell you, habitually forgot all about that earsplitting klaxon at his left elbow. He was always in too much of a hurry to blow it; and anyway, by the time he reached a turn, he was around it; there either was no car in the road or Casey had scraped paint off it or worse and gone on. So why honk?
Far distances called Casey. In one day, he meditated, he could cover more desert with his Ford than horses could travel in a week. An old, half-buried passion stirred, lifted its head and smiled at him seductively,—a dream he had dreamed of finding some of that wealth which Nature holds so miser-like in her hills. A gold mine, or perhaps silver or copper,—what matter which mineral he found, so long as it spelled wealth for him? Then he would buy a bigger car and a faster car, and he would bore farther and farther into yonder. In his past were tucked away months on end of tramping across deserts and up mountain defiles with a packed burro nipping patiently along in front of him and this same, seductive dream beckoning him over the next horizon. Burros had been slow. While he hurtled down the road from Pinnacle to Lund, Casey pictured himself plodding through sand and sage and over malapai and up dry canyons, hazing a burro before him.
“No, sir, the time for that is gone by. I could do in a week now what it took me a month to do then. I could get into country a man’d hate to tackle afoot, not knowing the water holes. I’ll git me a radiator that don’t boil like a teakettle over a pitch fire, and load up with water and grub and gas, and I’ll find the Injun Jim mine, mebby. Or some other darn mine that’ll put me in the clear the rest of my life. Couldn’t before, because I had to travel too slow. But shucks! A Ford can go anywhere a mountain goat can go. You ask anybody.”
So Casey sold his stage line and the hypothetical good will that went with it, and Pinnacle and Lund breathed long and deep and planned trips they had refrained from taking heretofore, and wished Casey luck. Bill Masters laid a friendly hand on his shoulder and made a suggestion so wise that not even Casey could shut his mind against it.
“You’re starting out where there won’t be no Bill handy to fix what you bust,” he pointed out. “You wait over a day or two, Casey, and let me show yuh a few things about that car. If you bust down on the desert you’ll want to know what’s wrong, and how to fix it. It’s easy, but you got to know where to look for the trouble.”
“Me? Say, Bill, I never had to go lookin’ for trouble,” Casey grinned. “What do I need to learn how for?”
Nevertheless he remained all of that day with Bill and crammed on mechanics. He was amazed to discover how many and how different were the ailments that might afflict a Ford. That he had boldly—albeit unconsciously—driven a thing filled with timers, high-tension plugs that may become fouled and fail to “spark,” carburetors that could get out of adjustment (whatever that was) spark plugs that burned out and had to be replaced, a transmission that absolutely must have grease or something happened, bearings that were prone to burn out if they went dry of oil, and a multitude of other mishaps that could happen and did happen if one did not watch out, would have filled Casey with foreboding if that were possible. Being an optimist to the middle of his bones, he merely felt a growing pride in himself. He had actually driven all this aggregation of potential internal grief! Whenever anything had happened to his Ford auty-mo-bile between Pinnacle and Lund, Casey never failed to trace the direct cause, which had always been external rather than internal, save that time when he had walked in and bought a new car without out probing into the vitals of the other.
“I’d ruther have a horse down with glanders,” he sighed, when Bill finally washed the grease off his hands and forearms and rolled down his sleeves. “But Casey Ryan’s game to try anything once, and most things the second and third time. You ask anybody. Gimme all the hootin’-annies that’s liable to wear out, Bill, and a load uh tires and patches, and Casey’ll come back and hand yuh a diamond big as your fist, some day. Ole Lady Trouble’s always tryin’ to take a fall outa me, but she’s never got me down so’t I had to holler ‘nough. You ask anybody. Casey Ryan’s goin’ out to see what he can see. If he meets up with Miss Fortune, he’ll tame her, Bill. And this little Ford auty-mo-bile is goin’ to eat outa my hand. I don’t give a cuss if she does git sore and ram her spark plugs into her carburetor now and agin. She’ll know who’s boss, Bill. I learnt it to the burros, and what you can learn a burro you can learn a Ford, take time enough.”
Taking that point of view and keeping it, Casey managed very well. Whenever anything went wrong that his vocabulary and a monkey wrench could not mend, Casey sat down on the shadiest running board and conned the Instruction Book which Bill handed him at the last minute. Other times he treated the Ford exactly as he would treat a burro, with satisfactory results.
Chapter III
Away out on the high mesas that are much like the desert below, except that the nights are cool and the wind is not fanned out of a furnace, Casey fought sand and brush and rocks and found a trail now and then which he followed thankfully, and so came at last to a short range of mountains whose name matched well their inhospitable stare. The Starvation Mountains had always been reputed rich in mineral and malevolent in their attitude toward man and beast. Even the Joshua trees stood afar off and lifted grotesque arms defensively against them. But Casey was not easily daunted, and eerie places held for him no meaning save the purely material one. If he could find water and the rich vein of ore some one had told him was there, then Casey would be happy in spite of snakes, tarantulas and sinister stories of the place.
Water he found, not too far up a gulch. So he pitched his tent within carrying distance from the spring, thanked the god of mechanics that an automobile neither eats nor drinks when it does not work, and set out to find his fortune.
Casey knew there was a mining camp on the high slope of Barren Butte. He knew the name of the camp, which was Lucky Lode, and he knew the foreman there—knew him from long ago in the days when Casey was what he himself confessed to be wild. In reaching Starvation Mountains, Casey had driven for fifteen miles within plain sight of Lucky Lode. But gas is precious when you are a hundred miles from a garage, and since business did not take him there Casey did not drive up the five-mile hill to the Lucky Lode just to shake hands with the foreman and swap a yarn or two. Instead, he headed down on to the bleached, bleak oval of Furnace Lake and forged across it as straight as he could drive toward Starvation Mountains.
But the next time Casey made the trip—needing supplies, powder, fuse, caps and so on—Fate took him by the ear and led him to a lady. This is how Fate did it,—and I will say it was an original idea:
Casey had a gallon syrup can in the car which he used for extra oil for the engine. Having an appetite for sour-dough biscuits and syrup, he had also a gallon can of syrup in the car. It was a terrifically hot day, and the wind that blew full against Casey’s left cheek as he drove burned even his leather skin where it struck. Casey was afraid he was running short of water, and a Ford’s comfort comes first,—as every man knows; so that Casey was parched pretty thoroughly, inside and out. Within a mile of Furnace Lake he stopped, took an unsatisfying sip from his big canteen and emptied the rest of the water into the radiator. Then he replenished the oil in the motor generously, cranked and went bumping along down the trail worn rough with the trucks from Lucky Lode.
For a little way he jounced along the trail; then the motor began to labor; and although Casey pulled the gas lever down as far as it would go, the car slowed and stopped dead in the road. After an hour of fruitless monkey-wrenching and swearing and sweating, Casey began to suspect something. He examined both cans, “hefted” them, smelt and even tasted the one half-empty, and decided that Ford auty-mo-biles do not require two quarts of syrup at one dose. He thought that a little syrup ought not to make much difference, but half a gallon was probably too much.
He put in more oil on top of the syrup, but he could not even move the crank, much less “turn ‘er over.” So long as a man can wind the crank of a Ford he seems able to keep alive his hopes. Casey could not crank, wherefore he knew himself beaten even while he heaved and lifted and swore,