The foreman grinned. “We thought you’d drove into the crevice, and we went down with lanterns and hunted the full length of it. We never found a sign of you or the car—”
“‘Cause I was over in camp, or thereabouts,” interpolated Casey drily. “I wish you’d of come on over. I sure needed help.”
“We figured you was pretty well lit up, to circle around like that. I’ve been down since, by daylight, and so have some of the boys, looking into that crevice. But we gave it up, finally.”
Then Casey, because he liked a joke even when it was on himself, told the foreman and his men what had happened to him. He did not exaggerate the mishap; the truth was sufficiently wild.
They whooped with glee. Every one laughs at the unusual misfortunes of others, and this was unusual. They stood around the Ford and talked to it, and whooped again. “You sure must have had so-ome jag, Casey,” they told him exuberantly.
“I was sober,” Casey testified earnestly. “I’ll swear I hadn’t a drop of anything worse than lemon soda, and that was before I left town.” Whereupon they whooped the louder, bent double, some of them with mirth.
“Say! If I was drunk that night, I’d say so,” Casey exploded finally. “What the hell—what’s the matter with you rabbits? You think Casey Ryan has got to the point where he’s scared to tell what he done and all he done? Lemme tell yuh, anything Casey does he ain’t afraid to tell about! Lyin’ is something I never was scared bad enough to do. You ask anybody.”
“There’s the widow,” said the foreman, wiping his eyes.
Casey turned and looked, but the widow was not in sight. The foreman, he judged, was speaking figuratively. He swung back glaring.
“You think I’m scared to tell her what happened? She’ll know I was sober if I say I was sober. She ain’t as big a fool—” He did not want to fight, although he was aching to lick every man of them. But for one thing, he was too sore and lame, and then, the widow would not like it.
With his neck very stiff, Casey limped down to the house and tried to tell the widow. But the widow was a woman, and she was hurt because Casey, since he was alive and not in the crevice, had not come straight to comfort her, but had lingered up there talking and laughing with the men. The widow had taken Casey’s part when the others said he must have been drunk. She had maintained, red-lidded and trembly of voice, that something had gone wrong with Casey’s car so that he couldn’t steer it. Such things happened, she knew.
Well, Casey told the widow the truth, and the widow’s face hardened while she listened. She had permitted him to kiss her when he came in, but now she moved away from him. She did not call him dear boy, nor even Casey dear. She waited until he had reached the point that puzzled him, the point of a Ford’s degree of intelligence. Then her lips thinned before she opened them.
“And what,” she asked coldly, “had you been drinking, Mr. Ryan?”
“Me? One bottle of lemon soda before I left town, and I left town at three o’clock in the afternoon. I swear—”
“You need not swear, Mr. Ryan.” The widow folded her hands and regarded him sternly, though her voice was still politely soft. “After I had told you repeatedly that my little ones should ever be guarded from a drinking father; after you had solemnly promised me that you would never again put glass to your lips, or swallow a drop of whisky; after that very morning renewing your pledge—”
“Well, I kept it,” Casey said, his face a shade paler under its usual frank red. “I swear to Gawd I was sober.”
“You need not lie,” said the widow, “and add to your misdeeds. You were drunk. No man in his senses would imagine what you imagine, or do what you did. I wish you to understand, Mr. Ryan, that I shall not marry you. I could not trust you out of my sight.”
“I—was—sober!” cried Casey, measuring his words. Very nearly shouting them, in fact.
The widow turned pointedly away and began to stir something on the stove, and did not look at him.
Casey went out, climbed the hill to his Ford, cranked it and went larruping down the hill, out on the lake and, when he had traversed half its length, turned and steered a straight course across it. Where tracings of wheels described a wide circle he stopped and regarded them intently. Then he began to swear, at nothing in particular, but with a hearty enjoyment of the phrases he intoned.
“Casey, you sure as hell have had one close call,” he remarked, when he could think of nothing new and devilish to say. “You mighta run along, and run along, till you got married to her. Whadda I want a wife for, anyway? Sour-dough biscuits tastes pretty good, and Casey sure can make ‘em!” He got out his pipe, filled it and crammed down the tobacco, found a match and leaned back, smoking with relish, one leg thrown over the wheel.
“A man’s best friend is his Ford,” he exclaimed. “You can ask anybody.” He grinned, and blew a lot of smoke, and gave the wheel an affectionate little twist.
Chapter V
Some months later Casey waved good-by to the men from Tonopah, squinted up at the sun and got a coal-oil can of water, with which he filled the radiator of his Ford. He rolled his bed in the tarp and tied it securely, put flour, bacon, coffee, salt and various other small necessities of life into a box, inspected his sour-dough can, and decided to empty it and start over again if hard fate drove him to sourdough.
“Might bust down and have to sleep out,” he meditated. “Then, agin, I ain’t liable to; and if I do, I’ll be goin’ so fast I’ll git somewhere before she stops. I’m—sure—goin’ to go!”
He cranked the battered car, straddled in over the edge on the driver’s side and set his feet against the pedals with the air of a man who had urgent business elsewhere. The men from Tonopah were not yet out of sight around the butte scarred with rhyolite ledges before Casey was under way, rattling down the rough trail from Starvation Mountain and bouncing clear of the seat as the car lurched over certain rough spots.
Pinned with a safety pin to the inside pocket of the vest he wore only when he felt need of a safe and secret pocket, Casey Ryan carried a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, made payable to himself. A check for twenty-five thousand dollars in Casey’s pocket was like a wildcat clawing at his imagination and spitting at every moment’s delay. Casey had endured solitude and some hardship while he coaxed Starvation Mountain to reveal a little of its secret treasure. Now he wanted action, light, life and plenty of it. While he drove he dreamed, and his dreams beckoned, urged him faster and faster.
Up over the summit of the ridge that lay between Starvation and Furnace Lake he surged, with radiator bubbling. Down the long slope to the lake, lying there smiling sardonically at a world it loved to trick with its moods, Casey drove as if he were winning a bet. Across that five miles of baked, yellow-white clay he raced, his Ford a-creak in every joint.
“Go it, you tin lizard!” chortled Casey. “I’ll have me a real wagon when I git to Los. She’ll be white, with red stripes along her sides and red wheels, and she’ll lay ‘er belly to the ground and eat up the road and lick her chops for more. Sixty miles under her belt every time the clock strikes, or she ain’t good enough fer Casey! Mebby they think they got some drivers in Californy. Mebby they think they have. They ain’t, though, because Casey Ryan ain’t there yet. I’ll catch that night train. Oughta be in by morning, and then you keep your eye on Casey. There’s goin’ to be a stir around Los, about to-morrow noon. I’ll have to buy some clothes, I guess. And I’ll git acquainted with some nice girl with yella hair that likes pleasure, and take her out ridin’. Yeah, I’ll have to git me a swell outfit uh clothes. I’ll look the part, all right—-”
Up a long, winding trail and over another summit to Yucca