He paused and muttered angrily, gazing off towards the dump where crooked-necked George stood guard, and then he hopped out to crank up.
“Want a ride?” he asked, as he saw Virginia watching him and she hesitated and shook her head. “Come on,” he smiled, casting aside his black mood, “let’s take a little spin–just down on the desert and back. What’s going on–getting ready to move?”
He gazed with alarm at a pile of packing boxes that the Widow had marshaled on the gallery and then he looked back at Virginia. She was attired in a gown that had been very chic in the fall of nineteen ten, but, though it was scant for these bouffant days, she was the old Virginia still–slim and strong and dainty, and highbred in every line, with dark eyes that mirrored passing thoughts. She was the Virginia he had played with when Keno was booming and his own sisters had been there for company; and now after ten years he remembered the time when he had asked her, in vain, for a kiss.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said at last and Virginia stepped into the racer.
“Virginia!” reminded the Widow, and then at a glance she turned round and flung into the house. There were times and occasions when she had found it safer not to press her maternal authority too far, and the look that she received was first notice from Virginia that such an occasion had arrived. The motor began to thunder, Wiley threw in the clutch, and with a speed that was startling, they whipped a sudden circle and went bubbling away down the road.
It stretched on endlessly, this road across the desert, as straight as a surveyor’s line, and as they cleared the rough gulches and glided down into its immensity Virginia glanced at the desert and sighed.
“Pretty big,” he suggested and as she nodded slowly he raised his eyes to the hills. “I don’t know,” he went on, “whether you’ll like Los Angeles. You’ll get lonely for this, sometimes.”
“Yes, but not for that”–she jerked a thumb back at Keno–“that place is pretty small. What’s left, of course; but it seems to me sometimes they’re all of them lame, halt and blind. Always quarreling and backbiting and jumping each other’s claims–but–what do you think of the Paymaster?”
She shot the question at him and it occurred suddenly to Wiley that perhaps she had a programme, too.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he began, deftly changing his ground, “I’m in Dutch on that, all around. When I came home full of buckshot and the Old Man heard about it I got my orders to come back and apologize. Well, I’ll do that–to you–and you can tell your mother I’m sure sorry I went up on that dump.”
He grinned and motioned to his injured foot, but Virginia was in no mood for a joke.
“That’s all right,” she said, “and I accept your apology–though I don’t know exactly what it’s for. But I asked your opinion of the Paymaster.”
“Oh, yes,” he replied and then he began to temporize. “You’d better tell me what you want it for, first.”
“What? Do you have one opinion for one set of people and another for somebody else? I thought!”─ She paused and the hot blood leapt to her cheeks as she saw where her temper had led her. “Well,” she explained, “I’ve got a few shares of stock.”
She said it quietly and the suggestion of scolding gave way to a chastened appeal. She remembered–and he sensed it–that winged shaft which he had flung back when she had said he was honest, like his father. He had told her then she was becoming like her mother, and Virginia could never endure that.
“Ah, I see,” he answered and went on hurriedly with a new note of friendliness in his voice. “Well, I’ll tell you, Virginia, if it will be any accommodation to you I’ll take over that stock myself. But–well, I hate to advise you–because–how many shares have you got?”
“Oh, several thousand,” she responded casually. “They were given to me by father–and by different men that I’ve helped. Mr. Masters, you know, that I took care of for a while, he gave me all he had when he died. But I don’t want to sell them–I know there’s no market, because Blount wouldn’t give Mother anything–but if he should happen to strike something─”
She glanced across at him swiftly but Wiley’s face was grim.
“Yes, himfind anything!” he jeered. “That fat-headed old tub! He knows about as much about mining as a hog does about the precession of the equinox. No; miracles may happen but, short of that, he’ll never get back a cent!”
“No, but Wiley,” she protested, “you know as well as I do that the Paymaster isn’t worked out. Now what’s to prevent my stock becoming valuable sometime when they open it up?”
“What’s to prevent?” he repeated. “Well, I’ll tell you what. If Blount makes a strike he’ll close that mine down and send the company through bankruptcy. Then he’ll buy the mine back on a judgment and you’ll be left without a cent.”
“But what about you?” she suggested shrewdly. “Will you let him serve youlike that?”
“Don’t you think it!” he answered. “I know him too well–my money is somewhere else.”
“But if you should buy the mine?”
“Well─” he stirred uneasily and then shot his machine ahead–“I haven’t bought it yet.”
“No, but you offered to, and I don’t see why─”
“Do you want to sell your stock?” he asked abruptly and she flushed and shook her head. “Well!” he said and without further comment he slowed down and swung about.
“Oh, dear,” she sighed, as they started back and he turned upon her swiftly.
“Do you know why I wouldn’t have that mine,” he inquired, “if you’d hand it to me as a gift? It’s because of this everlasting fight. I own it, right now, if anybody does, and I’ve never been down the shaft. Now suppose I’d go over there and shoot it out with George and get possession of my mine. First Blount would come up with some other hired man-killer and I’d have a bout with him; and then your respected mother─”
“Now you hush up!” she chided and he closed down his jaw like a steel-trap. She watched him covertly, then her eyes began to blink and she turned her head away. The desert rushed by them, worlds of waxy green creosote bushes and white, gnarly clumps of salt bush; and straight ahead, frowning down on the forgotten city, rose the black cloud-shadow of Shadow Mountain.
“Oh, turn off here!” she cried, impulsively as they came to a fork in the road and, plowing up the sand, he skidded around a curve and struck off up the Death Valley road. They came together at the edge of the town–the long, straight road to the south, and the road-trail that led west into the silence. There were no tracks in it now but the flat hoof-prints of burros and the wire-twined wheel-marks of desert buckboards; even the road was half obliterated by the swoop of the winds which had torn up the hard-packed dirt, yet the going was good and as the racer purred on Virginia settled back in her seat.
“I can’t believe it,” she said at last, “that we’re going to leave here, forever. This is the road that Father took when he left home that last time–have you ever been over into Death Valley? It’s a great, big sink, all white with salt and borax; and at the upper end, where he went across, there are miles and miles of sand-hills. He’s buried out there somewhere, and the hills have covered him–but oh, it’s so awful lonesome!”
She turned away again and as her head went down Wiley stared straight ahead and blinked. He had known the Colonel and loved him well, and his father had loved him, too; but that rift had come between them and until it was healed he could never be a friend of Virginia’s. She distrusted him in everything–in his silence and in his speech, his laughter and his anger, in his