The Mesa Trail. H. Bedford-Jones
retorted. “She bucks like a range hoss and kicks to beat hell—why, I couldn’t hardly keep the saddle!”
The sheriff arose and went to the dust-white flivver. He adjusted the spark, cranked, and for a moment listened to the engine before killing it. Then he threw back the hood, and, under the sombre eyes of Thady Shea, worked in silence. At length he finished his task, started the engine again, and with a nod of satisfaction shut it off.
“Thought mebbe so,” he stated, rejoining the lady. “Your spark plugs was fouled. Well, ma’am, what can I be doin’ for you?”
“Ye might send me a wire in care of Coravel Tio whenever ye get a line on Dorales or Mackintavers. I’m fixing to meet them again.”
“How come?” demanded the sheriff in surprise.
Mrs. Crump gestured with her pipe toward the flivver.
“I got a sack of ore in there that I found in the lava beds or thereabouts. I suspicions it’s one o’ these new-fangled things nobody give a whoop for in the old days, but that draws down the money now. If it is, then you can lay that Sandy will hear I’ve found it, and he’ll be after me to jump the claim.”
“He sure does keep a line on prospectors,” reflected the sheriff. “And skins ’em, too, mostly. But he does it legal.”
“Yep. If this here stuff is any good, Sam, they’s going to be some smoke ’fore he gets his paws on it! Where you goin’ from here? Back to Albuquerque?”
“Nope. I got some business up at the capital.”
“Will ye tote that ore sack and a letter up to Coravel Tio for me—and do it strictly under your hat?”
“You bet I will, ma’am!”
Mrs. Crump unstrapped the burlap sack. With the sheriff’s pencil and paper she settled down to write a letter. The process was obviously painful and laborious, but at length it was finished. The sheriff shook hands, picked up the sack, and turned to his car. Mrs. Crump had already restored him his revolver.
“Take good care of yourself, ma’am—and your hobo! Adios.”
Mrs. Crump watched the trail of dust disappear in the direction of Santa Fé, then she turned to the flivver and looked up at Thady Shea.
“They’s a new corncob laying in back somewheres. You can have it, Thady. Get out here and settle down for a spell o’ talk. If ye act real good I’ll give ye a drink.”
“I don’t want any,” came Shea’s muffled voice as he leaned back in search of the pipe.
“That’s a lie. You’re fair shaking for liquor and a drop will brace ye up.”
Shea procured the pipe, filled and lighted, and promptly assumed, as a garment, his usual histrionic pose. The gulp of liquor which Mrs. Crump carefully measured out sent a thin thread of colour into his gaunt, unshaven cheeks.
“Madam, I owe you all,” he announced sonorously. “I have not missed the heart of things set forth in this your discourse to the sheriff’s ear, and I have gathered that your need is great for the strong arms of friends, the counsel wise——”
“You got it,” cut in Mrs. Crump, curtly. “The p’int is, Thady, where do you come in? Listen here, now! I got a good eye for men; ye ain’t much account as ye stand, but ye got the makin’s. Now cut out the booze and I’ll take ye for partner, savvy? What’s more, I’ll spend a couple o’ weeks attending to it that ye do cut out the booze! I sure need a partner who ain’t liable to sell me out to them heathen. Can ye down the booze, or not?”
Something in her tone cut through the man’s posturing like a knife. As a matter of fact, he was miserable in spirit; his soul quivered nakedly before him, and he was ashamed. For a space he did not answer, but stared at the far mountains. The strong tragedy of his face was accentuated and deepened into utter bitterness.
What Mrs. Crump had only vaguely and darkly seen Thady Shea observed clearly and with wonder; yet, just as she missed the more mystical side of it, he missed the more practical side. More diverse creatures wearing human semblance could scarce have been found than these twain, here met upon a desert upland of New Mexico—the woman, a self-reliant mountaineer and prospector who knew only her own little world, the man a drunkard, a broken-down “hamfatter,” who knew all the outside world which had rejected him. They had come together from different spheres.
As he sat there staring, he mentally and for the last time reviewed the life that lay behind him; before him uprose all the contemptuous years, the sad wreckage of high hopes and tinsel glories, the hard and wretched fact of liquor. He would shut it out of his mind forever, after to-day, he thought. He would live in the present only, from day to day. He would try a new life—and let the dead bury their dead!
He turned to Mrs. Crump, his sad and earnest eyes looking oddly cynical.
“I do not think it humanly possible that I can resist liquor,” he said, gravely. “I am frank with you. It were easy to swear that I would pluck out drowned honour by the roots—but, madam, I think that this morning I am weary of swearing. I have tried to abstain, and I cannot. Always it is the first week or two of torture that downs me——
“You’re showin’ sense, now,” said the lady. “Want to try it or not?”
He rose in the car and attempted a bow in his showy and pitiful manner. In this bow, however, was an element of grace, the more pronounced by its sharp contrast to his gaunt, sombre aspect.
“Madam, I am deeply sensible of the compliment you pay me. Yet, in picking from the gutter a drunken failure, are you wise? I am entirely ignorant of prospecting and——”
“Don’t worry none. Ye’ll learn that quick enough.”
Again Thaddeus bowed. “But, madam, I understand that prospectors go off into the desert places and live. In justice to yourself, do you not think that your enemies might seize viciously upon the least excuse for misinterpretation of character——”
For the first time Shea saw Mehitabel Crump gripped in anger. He paused, aghast.
Her gigantic form quivered with rage then stiffened into towering wrath. Her tanned, age-touched features suddenly hardened into sentient bronze from which her blue eyes blazed forth terribly, jewelled indices of an indomitable and quick-flaming spirit within.
“Thady Shea, it’s well for you them words come from an honest heart,” said she, with a slow and grim emphasis. “They ain’t no one goin’ to say a word agin’ me, except them for what I don’t give a tinker’s dam; and if one o’ them dasts to say it in my hearin’, chain lightnin’ is goin’ to strike quick and sudden! This here territory—state, I mean—knows Mehitabel Crump and has knowed her for some years back. Paste that in your hat, Thady Shea!”
As some dread lioness hears in dreams the horns and shouts of hunters, and starting erect with bristling front mutters her low and terrible growl of challenge, so Mehitabel Crump defiantly faced Thaddeus.
He, poor soul, inwardly cursed his too-nimble tongue, and shrank visibly from the spectacle of wrath. Before the hurt and amazed eyes of him Mrs. Crump suddenly abandoned her righteous attitude. Having palpably overawed him, she now felt ashamed of herself.
“There, buck up,” she brusquely ordered.
“Tell me, now! If I answer for it that ye stay sober a couple o’ weeks or so, will ye make the fight?”
“Yes.” Hope fought against despair in Shea’s voice; he knew his own weakness well.
“All right. Let’s go, then!”
“We’re going to Santa Fé?”
Mrs. Crump advanced to the front of the flivver, and seized the crank. Then she paused, her blue eyes striking up over the radiator at Shea.
“No, I ain’t goin’ to Santy Fé; neither are you! We’re