Louisiana Lou. A Western Story

CHAPTER VI
WHERE THE DESERT HAD BEEN

Solange awoke in the bustling, prosperous environment of Sulphur Falls, nestled in the flats below the cañon of the Serpentine, with a feeling of ease and comfort. She had expected to find some wild, frontier village, populated by Indians and cowboys, a desperate and lawless community, and, instead, encountered a small but luxurious hotel, paved streets, shops, people dressed much as they had been in New York. She knew nothing of the changes that had taken place with the building of the great irrigation dam and the coming of the war factories which belched smoke back at the foot of the cañon. She did not realize that, twenty years ago, there had been no town, nothing but limitless plains on which cattle and sheep grazed, a crude ferry and a road house. It was beyond her present comprehension that in a dozen years a city could have sprung up harboring twenty thousand souls and booming with prosperity. Nor did she reflect upon the possible consequences these unknown facts might have upon her search.

Everything was strange to her, and yet everything was what she was accustomed to. Comfort and even luxury surrounded her, and the law stalked the streets openly in the person of a uniformed policeman. That fact, indeed, spelled a misgiving to her, for, where the law held sway, a private vengeance became a different thing from what she had imagined it to be. Only De Launay’s careless gibe as he had left her at the hotel held promise of performance. “To-morrow we’ll start our private butchery,” he had said, and grinned. But even that gibe hinted at a recklessness that matched her own and gave her comfort now.

De Launay, coming into the glittering new town utterly unprepared for the change that had taken place, had felt the environment strike him like a blow. He saw people like those on Broadway, walking paved sidewalks in front of plate glass under brilliant electric lights. He had come back to seek rest for his diseased nerves in the limitless ranges of his youth and this was what he found.

He had turned and looked back at the frowning cañon through which the train had come from the northeast. There were the mountains, forest clad and cloud capped, as of old. There was the great, black lava gulch of the Serpentine. It looked the same, but he knew that it was changed.

Smoke hung above the cañon where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause of all this change, where had once been the roaring falls now sprang a gigantic bow of masonry, two hundred feet in height, and back of it the cañon held a vast lake of water where once had run the foaming Serpentine. From the dam enormous dynamos took their impulses, and from it also huge ditches and canals led the water out and around the valley down below.

Where the lonely road house had stood at the ford across the Serpentine, and the reckless range riders had stopped to drink and gamble, now stood the town, paved with asphalt and brick, jammed with cottages and office buildings, theaters, factories, warehouses, and mills. Plate glass gleamed in the sun or, at night, blazed in the effulgence of limitless electricity.

Around the town, grown in a few years to twenty thousand souls, stretched countless acres of fenced and cultivated land, yielding bountifully under the irrigating waters. From east and west long trains of nickel-plated Pullmans pulled into a granite station.

The people spoke the slang of Broadway and danced the fox trot in evening clothes.

Southward, where the limitless desert had been, brown or white with alkali, one beheld, as far as eye could reach, orderly green patches of farmland, fenced and dotted with the dainty houses of the settlers.

But no! There was something more, beyond the farms and beyond the desert. It was a blue and misty haze on the horizon, running an uneven and barely discernible line about the edges of the bright blue sky. It was faint and undefined, but De Launay knew it for the Esmeralda range, standing out there aloof and alone and, perhaps, still untamed and uncivilized.

He felt resentful and at the same time helpless. To him it seemed that his last chance to win ease of mind and rest from the driving restlessness had been taken away from him. Only the mountains remained to offer him a haven, and those might be changed as this spot was.

The natural thing to do was to drown his disappointment in drink, and that is what he set out to do. He left Solange safely ensconced in the shiny, new hotel, whose elevators and colored waiters filled him with disgust and sought the darker haunts of the town.

With sure instinct for the old things, if they still existed, he hunted up a “livery and feed barn.” He found one on a side street, near a lumber yard and not far from the loading chutes which spoke of a considerable traffic in beef cattle. He noted with bitterness a cheap automobile standing in front of the place.

But there were horses in the stalls, horses that lolled on a dropped hip, with heads down and eyes closed. There were heavy roping saddles hanging on the pegs, and bridles with ear loops and no throat latches. If the proprietor, one MacGregor, wore a necktie and a cloth cap, he forgave him for the sake of the open waistcoat and the lack of an outer coat.

MacGregor was an incident of little importance. One of more consequence was a good horse that roamed the open feed yard at the side of the barn. De Launay, seedy and disreputable, still had a look about him that spoke of certain long dead days, and MacGregor, when he was asked about the horse, made no mistake in concluding that he had to deal with one who knew what he was about.

The horse was MacGregor’s, taken to satisfy a debt, and he would sell it. The upshot of the affair was that De Launay bought it at a fair price. This took time, and when he finally came out again to the front of the barn it was late afternoon.

Squatted against the wall, their high heels planted under them on the sloping boards of the runway, sat two men. Wide, flapping hats shaded their faces. They wore no coats, although the November evenings were cool and their waistcoats hung open. Overalls of blue denim, turned up at the bottoms in wide cuffs, hid all but feet and wrinkled ankles of their boots which were grooved with shiny semicircles around the heels, where spurs had dented them.

One of them was as tall as De Launay, gaunt and hatchet faced. His hair was yellowish, mottled with patches of grayish green.

The other was sturdy, shorter, with curly, brown hair.

The tall one was humming a tune. De Launay recognized it with a shock of recollection. “Roll on, my little doggy!”

Without a word he sat down also, in a duplicate of their pose. No one spoke for several minutes.

Then, the shorter man said, casually, addressing his remarks to nobody in particular.

“They’s sure a lotta fresh pilgrims done hit this here town.”

The tall one echoed an equally casual chorus.

“They don’t teach no sort of manners to them down-East hobos, neither.”

De Launay stared impassively at the road in front of them.

“You’d think some of them’d sense it that a gent has got a right to be private when he wants to be.”

“It’s a – of a town, nohow.”

“People even run around smellin’ of liquor – which is plumb illegal, Sucatash.”

“Which there are some that are that debased they even thrives on wood alcohol, Dave.”

Silence settled down on them once more. It was broken this time by De Launay, who spoke as impersonally as they.

“They had real cow hands hereaways, once.”

A late and sluggish fly buzzed in the silence.

“I reckon the sheep eat ’em outa range and they done moved down to Arizona.”

The gaunt Sucatash murmured sadly:

“Them pilgrims is sure smart on g’ography an’ history.”

“An’ sheep – especially,” said the one called Dave.

“Ca ne fait rien!” said De Launay, pronouncing it almost like “sinferien” as he had heard the linguists of the A. E. F. do. The two men slowly turned their heads and looked at him apparently aware of his existence for the first time.

Like MacGregor, they evidently saw something beneath his habiliments, though the small mustache puzzled them.

“You-all been to France?” asked Dave. De Launay did not answer direct.

“There was some reputed bronk peelers nursin’ mules overseas,” he mused. “Their daddies would sure have been mortified to see ’em.”

“We didn’t dry nurse no mules, pilgrim,” said Sucatash. “When did you lick Hindenburg?”

De Launay condescended to notice them. “In the battle of vin rouge,” he said. “I reckon you-all musta won a round or two with the vin sisters, yourselves.”

“You’re sure a-sayin’ something, old-timer,” said Dave, with emotion. For the first time he saw the rosette in De Launay’s buttonhole. “You done a little more’n café fightin’ though, to get that?”

De Launay shrugged his shoulders. “They give those for entertainin’ a politician,” he answered. “Any cow hands out of a job around here?”

Both of the men chuckled. “You aimin’ to hire any riders?”

“I could use a couple to wrangle pilgrims in the Esmeraldas. More exactly, there’s a lady, aimin’ to head into the mountains and she’ll need a couple of packers.”

“This lady don’t seem to have no respect for snow and blizzards, none whatever,” was the comment.

“Which she hasn’t, bein’ troubled with notions about gold mines and such things. She needs taking care of.”

“Ridin’ the Esmeraldas this time o’ year and doin’ chores for Pop all winter strikes me as bein’ about a toss-up,” said the man called Sucatash. “I reckon it’s a certainty that Pop requires considerable labor, though, and maybe this demented lady won’t. If the wages is liberal – ”

“We ought to see the lady, first,” said Dave. “There’s some lady pilgrims that couldn’t hire me with di’monds.”

“The pay’s all right and the lady’s all right. She’s French.”

“A mad’mo’selle?” they echoed.

“It’s a long story,” said De Launay, smiling. “You’d better see her and talk it over. Meantime, this prohibition is some burdensome.”

“Which it ain’t the happiest incumbrance of the world,” agreed Sucatash. “They do say that the right kind of a hint will work at the Empire Pool Rooms.”

“If they have it, we’ll get it,” asserted De Launay, confidently. “You-all point the way.”

The three of them rose by the simple process of straightening their legs at the knees, and walked away.

CHAPTER VII
MAID MARIAN GROWN UP

The Empire Pool Room was an innocent enough place to the uninitiate. To those who had the confidence of the proprietor it was something else. There were rooms upstairs where games were played that were somewhat different from pool and billiards. There was also a bar up there and the drinks that were served over it were not of the soft variety. It seemed that Sucatash and Dave MacKay were known here and had the entrée to the inner circles.

De Launay followed them trustfully. The only thing he took the trouble to note was at a rack in front of the place where – strange anachronism in a town that swarmed with shiny automobiles – were tethered two slumberous, moth-eaten burros laden with heavy packs, miners’ pan, pick and bedding.

“Prospector?” he asked, indicating the dilapidated songsters of the desert.

The two cow hands looked at the beasts, identifying them with the facility of their breed.

“Old Jim Banker, I reckon. In for a wrastlin’ match with the demon rum. Anything you want to know about the Esmeraldas he can tell you, if you can make him talk.”

“Old Jim Banker? Old-timer, is he?”

“Been a-soakin’ liquor and a-dryin’ out in the desert hereaways ever since fourteen ninety-two, I reckon. B’en here so long he resembles a horned toad more’n anything else.” This from Sucatash.

De Launay paused inside the door. “I wonder. Are there any more old-timers left hereaways?”

“Oh, sure. There’s some that dates back past the Spanish War. I reckon ‘Snake’ Murphy – he tends bar for Johnny the Greek, who runs this honkatonk – he’s one of ’em. Banker’s another. You remember when them Wall Street guys hired ‘Panamint Charlie’ Wantage to splurge East in a private car scatterin’ double eagles all the way and hoorayin’ about the big mine he had in Death Valley?”

“No,” said De Launay. “When was that?”

“Back in nineteen eight.”

“I was in Algeria then. I’d never heard. But I remember Panamint. He and Jim Banker were partners, weren’t they?”

“They was.” Sucatash looked curiously at De Launay, wondering how a man who was in Algeria came to know so much about these old survivals. “Leastways, I’ve heard tell they was both of them prospectin’ the Esmeraldas a whole lot in them days and hangin’ together. But Panamint struck this soft graft and wouldn’t let Jim in on it, so they broke up the household. You know – or maybe you don’t – that Panamint was finally found dead in a cave in Death Valley and there was talk that Banker followed him there and beefed him, thinkin’ he really had a mine. Nothin’ come of it except to make folks a little dubious about Jim. He never was remarkable for popularity, nohow, so it don’t amount to much.”

“And Snake Murphy: he used to keep the road house at the ford over the river, didn’t he?”

Once more Sucatash, fairly well informed on ancient history himself, eyed De Launay askance.

“Which he might have. That’s before my time, I reckon. I was just bein’ weaned when Louisiana was run out of the country. My old man could tell you all about it. He’s Carter Wallace, of the Lazy Y at Willow Spring.”

“I knew him,” said De Launay.

“You knowed my old man?”

“But maybe he’d not remember me.”

Sucatash sensed the fact that De Launay intended to be reticent. “Dad sure knows all the old-timers and their histories,” he declared. “Him and old Ike Brandon was the last ranchers left this side the Esmeraldas, and since Ike checked in a year ago he’s the last survivor. There’s a few has moved into town, but mostly the place is all pilgrims and nesters.”

They had climbed the stairs and come into the hidden sanctum of Johnny the Greek, and De Launay looked about curiously, noting the tables and the scattering of customers about the place, rough men, close cropped, hard faced and sullen of countenance, most of them, typical of the sort of itinerant labor that was filling the town with recruits and initiates of the I. W. W. There were one or two who were of cleaner strain, like the two young cowmen. Behind the bar was a red-faced, shifty-eyed man, wearing a mustache so black as to appear startling in contrast to his sandy hair. De Launay eyed him curiously, noting with a secret smile that his right arm appeared to be stiff at the wrist. He made no comment, however, but followed the two men to the bar where the business of the day began. It consisted of imbibing vile whisky served by the stiff-armed Snake Murphy.

But De Launay still had something on his mind. “You say Ike Brandon’s dead?” he asked. “What became of his granddaughter?”

“Went to work,” said Sucatash. “Dave, where’s Marian Pettis?”

“Beatin’ a typewriter fer ‘Cap’ Wilding, last I heard,” said Dave.

“She was a little girl when I knew her,” said De Launay, his voice softening a little with a queer change of accent into a Southern slur. Snake Murphy, who was polishing the rough bar in front of him, glanced quickly up, as though hearing something vaguely familiar. But he saw nothing but De Launay’s thoughtful eyes and sober face with its small, pointed mustache.

“’Scuse me, gents,” he murmured. “What’ll it be?”

“A very little girl,” said De Launay, absently looking into and through Murphy. “A sort of little fairy.”

The lanky Sucatash looked at him askance, catching the note of sentiment. “Yeah?” he said, a bit dryly. “Well, folks change, you know. They grow up.”

“Yes,” said De Launay.

“And this Marian Pettis, she done growed up. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against a lady, you understand, but she ain’t exactly in the fairy class nowadays, I reckon.”

De Launay, somewhat to his surprise, although he sensed the note of warning and dry enlightenment in Sucatash’s words, felt no shock. He had had a sentimental desire to see if the girl of six had fulfilled the promise of her youth after nineteen years, had even dreamed, in his soberer moments, of coming back to her to play the rôle of a prince, but nevertheless, he found himself philosophically accepting the possibility hinted at by Sucatash and even feeling a vague sort of relief.

“Who’s Wilding?” he asked. They told him that he was a young lawyer of the town, an officer of their regiment during the war. They seemed to think highly of him.

De Launay had postponed his intended debauch. In spite of mademoiselle’s conviction, his lapses from sobriety had been only occasional as long as he had work to do, and this occasion, after the information he had gathered, was one calling for the exercise of his faculties.

“If you-all will hang around and herd this here desert rat, Banker, with you when you can find him, and then call at the hotel for Mademoiselle d’Albret, I’ll look up this lawyer and his stenographer. I have to interview her.”

He left them then and went out, a bit unsteady, seedy, unprepossessing, but carrying under his dilapidated exterior some remains of the man he had been.

He reached Wilding’s office and found the man, a young fellow who appeared capable and alert. He also found, with a distinct shock, the girl who had occupied a niche in his memory for nineteen years. He found her with banged and docked hair, rouged and bepowdered, clad in georgette and glimmering artificial silk, tapping at a typewriter in Wilding’s office. He had seen Broadway swarming with replicas of her.

His business with Wilding took a little time. He explained that mademoiselle might have need of his legal services and certainly would wish to see Miss Pettis. The lawyer called the girl in and to her De Launay explained that mademoiselle was the daughter of her grandfather’s former employee and that she would wish to discuss with her certain matters connected with the death of French Pete. The girl swept De Launay with hard, disdainful eyes, and he knew that she was forming a concept of mademoiselle by comparison with his own general disreputableness.

“Oh, sure; I jus’ as soon drop in on this dame,” she said. “One o’ these Frog refygees, I s’pose. Well, believe me, she’s come a long way to get disappointed if she thinks I’m givin’ any hand-outs to granddad’s pensioners. I got troubles of my own.”

“We’ll be at the hotel, Miss Pettis and I,” said Wilding. “That will do, Miss Pettis.”

The girl teetered out on her spiky heels, with a sway of hips.

De Launay turned back to the lawyer. “I’ve a little personal business you might attend to,” he said. Wilding set himself to listen, resignedly, imagining that this bum would yield him nothing of profit.

In ten minutes he was staring at De Launay with amazement that was almost stupefaction, fingering documents as though he must awake from sleep and find he had been dreaming. De Launay talked on, his voice slightly thick, his eyes heavy, but his mind clear and capable.

Wilding went with him to a bank and, after their business there was finished, shook hands in parting with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval and awe.

De Launay, having finished the more pressing parts of his business, made straight for Johnny the Greek’s. The two burros still stood there, eyes closed and heads hanging. He walked around them before going in. A worn, dirty leather scabbard, bursting at the seams, slanted up past the withers of one brute, and out of its mouth projected the butt of a rifle. The plate was bright with wear, and the walnut of the stock was battered and dull with age.

De Launay scratched the chin of the burro, was rewarded by the lazy flopping of an ear and then went in to his delayed orgy.

He had received a shock, as he realized he would, and for the moment all thought of Solange and his responsibility to her had vanished. He had come back home after twenty years, seeking solace in the scenes he had known as a boy, seeking, with half-sentimental memory, a little girl with bright hair and sweet face. He had come to find a roaring, artificial city on the site of the range, the friends of his youth gone, the men he had known dying out, his very trade a vanishing art. Instead of a fairy maiden, sweet and demure, a grown-up child as he had vaguely pictured her, he had found a brazen, painted, slangy, gum-chewing flapper, a modern of moderns such as would have broken old Ike Brandon’s heart – as it doubtless had. The last of the old-timers were a bootlegging bartender and a half-crazy and wholly vicious prospector.

Writhing under the sting of futility and disappointment, even the rotten poison served by Johnny the Greek appealed to him. His old neurosis, almost forgotten in the half-tolerant, half-amused interest in Mademoiselle d’Albret’s adventure which had occupied his activities during the past weeks, revived with redoubled force. Sick, shaken, and disgusted, he strode through the pool room and, with deliberation masking his avid desire for forgetfulness, climbed the stairs to the hidden oasis presided over by his old enemy, Snake Murphy.