CHAPTER FIVE
GARY DOES A LITTLE SLEUTHING
Tonopah as a mining town appealed strongly to Gary’s love of the picturesque. Tonopah is a hilly little town, with a mine in its very middle, and with narrow, crooked streets that slope steeply and take sharp turnings. Houses perched on knobs of barren, red earth, or clung precariously to steep hillsides. The courthouse, a modern, cement building with broad steps flanked by pillars, stood with aloof dignity upon a hill that made Gary puff a little in the climbing.
On the courthouse steps he finished his cigarette before going inside, and stood gazing at the town below him and at the barren buttes beyond. As far as he could see, the world was a forbidding, sterile world; unfriendly, inhospitable—a miserly world guarding jealously the riches deep-hidden within its hills. When he tried to visualize range cattle roaming over those hills, Gary’s lips twisted contemptuously.
He turned and went in, his footsteps clumping down the empty, echoing corridor to the office of the County Recorder. A wholesome-looking girl with hair almost the color of Patricia’s rose from before a typewriter and came forward to the counter. Her eyes widened a bit when she looked at Gary, and the color deepened a little in her cheeks. Perhaps she had seen Gary’s face on the screen and remembered it pleasantly; certainly a man like Gary Marshall walks but seldom into the Recorder’s office of any desert county seat. Gary told her very briefly what he wanted, and the County Recorder herself came forward to serve him.
Very obligingly she looked up all the records pertaining to Johnnywater. Gary himself went in with her to lift the heavy record books down from their places in the vault behind the office. The County Recorder was thorough as well as obliging. Gary lifted approximately a quarter of a ton of books, and came out of the vault wiping perspiration from inside his collar and smoothing his plumage generally after the exercise. It was a warm day in Tonopah.
Gary had not a doubt left to pin his hopes upon. The County Recorder had looked up water rights to Johnnywater and adjacent springs, and had made sure that Waddell had made no previous transfers to other parties, a piece of treachery which Gary had vaguely hoped to uncover. Patricia’s title appeared to be dishearteningly unassailable. Gary would have been willing to spend his last dollar in prosecuting Waddell for fraud; but apparently no such villainy had brought Waddell within his clutches.
From the County Recorder, who had a warm, motherly personality and was chronically homesick for Pasadena and eager to help any one who knew the place as intimately as did Gary, he learned how great a stranger Tonopah is to her county corners. Pat was right, he discovered. Miles and miles of country lay all unsurveyed; a vast area to be approached in the spirit of the pioneer who sets out to explore a land unknown.
Roughly scaling the district on the county map which the Recorder borrowed from the Clerk (and which Gary promptly bought when he found that it was for sale) he decided that the water holes in the Johnnywater district were approximately twenty to forty miles apart.
“Pat’s cows will have to pack canteens where village bossies wear bells on their lavallieres,” Gary grinned to the County Recorder. “Calves are probably taboo in the best bovine circles of Nevada—unless they learn to ride to water on their mammas’ backs, like baby toads.”
The Recorder smiled at him somewhat wistfully. “You remind me of my son in Pasadena,” she said. “He always joked over the drawbacks. I wish you were going to be within riding distance of here; I’ve an extra room that I’d love to have you use sometimes. But—” she sighed, “—you’ll probably never make the trip over here unless you come the roundabout way on the train, to record something. And the mail is much more convenient, of course. What few prospectors record mining claims in that district nearly always send them by mail, I’ve noticed. In all the time I’ve been in office, this Mr. Waddell is the only man from that part of the county who came here personally. He said he had other business here, I remember, and intended going on East.”
“So Waddell went East, did he?” Gary looked up from the map. “He’s already gone, I suppose.”
“I suppose so. I remember he said he was going to England to visit his old home. His health was bad, I imagine; I noticed he looked thin and worried, and his manner was very nervous.”
“It ought to be,” Gary mumbled over the map. “Isn’t there any road at all, tapping that country from here?”
The Recorder didn’t know, but she thought the County Clerk might be able to tell him. The County Clerk had been much longer in the country and was in close touch with the work of the commissioners. So Gary thanked her with his nicest manner, sent a vague smile toward the girl with hair like Patricia’s, and went away to interview the County Clerk.
When he left the court house Gary had a few facts firmly fixed in his mind. He knew that Patricia’s fake cattle ranch was more accessible to Las Vegas than to Tonopah. Furthermore, the men who had signed the affidavits vouching for Waddell did not belong in Tonopah, but could probably be traced from Las Vegas more easily. And there seemed no question at all of the legality of the transaction.
Gary next day retraced the miles halfway back to Los Angeles, waited for long, lonesome hours in a tiny desert station for the train from Barstow, boarded it and made a fresh start, on another railroad, toward Patricia’s cattle ranch. So far he had no reason whatever for optimism concerning the investment. The best he could muster was a faint hope that some other trustful soul might be found with five thousand dollars, no business sense whatever and a hunger for story-book wilderness. Should such an improbable combination stray into Gary’s presence before Patricia’s Walking X cattle all starved to death, Gary promised himself grimly that he would stop at nothing short of a blackjack in his efforts to sell Johnnywater. He felt that Providence had prevailed upon Patricia to place that Power of Attorney in his hands, and he meant to use it to the limit.
In Las Vegas, where Gary continued his inquiries, he tramped here and there before he discovered any one who had ever heard of Johnnywater. One man knew Waddell slightly, and another was of the opinion that the two who had made affidavit for Waddell must live somewhere in the desert. This man suggested that Gary should stick around town until they came in for supplies or something. Gary snorted at that advice and continued wandering here and there, asking questions of garage men and street loiterers who had what he called the earmarks of the desert. One of these interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence, spat into the gutter and pointed.
“There’s one of ’em, now. That’s Monty Girard just turned the corner by the hotel. When he lights som’eres, you can talk to ’im. Like as not you can ride out with ’im to camp, if you got the nerve. Ain’t many that has. I tried ridin’ with ’im once for a mile, down here to the dairy, and I sure as hell feel the effects of it yet. Give me a crick in the back I never will git over. I’d ruther board a raw bronk any day than get in that Ford uh his’n. You go speak to Monty, mister. He can tell yuh more about what you want to know than any man in Vegas, I reckon.”
Gary watched the man in the Ford go rattling past, pull up to the sidewalk in the next block and stop. He sauntered toward the spot. It was a day for sauntering and for seeking the shady side of the street; Monty Girard was leaving the post-office with a canvas bag in his hand when Gary met him. Gary was not in the mood for much ceremony. He stopped Girard in the middle of the sidewalk.
“I believe you signed an affidavit for a man named Waddell, in regard to the Johnnywater outfit. I’d like to have a few minutes’ talk with you.”
“Why, shore!” Monty Girard glanced down at the mail bag, stepped past Gary and tossed the bag into the back of his car. “Your name’s Connolly, I guess. Going out to Johnnywater?”
Gary had not thought of friendliness toward any man connected with the Johnnywater transaction; yet friendliness was the keynote of Monty Girard’s personality. The squinty wrinkles around his young blue eyes were not all caused by facing wind and sun; laughter lines were there, plenty of them. His voice, that suggested years spent in the southwest where men speak in easy, drawling tones, caressing in their softness, was friendliness itself; as was his quick smile, disclosing teeth as white and even as Gary himself could boast. In spite of himself, Gary’s hostility lost its edge.
“If you haven’t got your own car, you’re welcome to ride out with me, Mr. Connolly. I’m going within fifteen miles of Johnnywater, and I can take yuh-all over as well as not.”
Gary grinned relentingly.
“I came over to see how much of that outfit was faked,” he said. “I’m not the buyer, but I have full authority to act for Pat Connolly. The deal was made rather—er—impulsively, and it is unfortunate that the buyer was unable to get over and see the place before closing the deal. Waddell has gone East, I hear. But you swore that things were as represented in the deal.”
Monty Girard gave him one searching look from under the brim of his dusty, gray Stetson range hat. He looked down, absently reaching out a booted foot to shake a front wheel of his Ford.
“What I swore to was straight goods, all right. I figured that if Mr. Connolly was satisfied with the deal as it stood, it was no put-in of mine. I don’t know of a thing that was misrepresented. Not if a man knows this country and knows what to expect.”
“Now we’re coming to the point, I think.” Gary felt oddly that here was a man who would understand his position and perhaps sympathize with the task he had set himself to accomplish.
Monty Girard hesitated, looking at him inquiringly before he glanced up and down the street.
“Say, mister——”
“Marshall. Pardon me. Gary Marshall’s my name.”
“Well, Mr. Marshall, it’s like this. I’m just in off a hundred-and-forty-mile drive—and it shore is hot from here to Indian. If you don’t mind helpin’ me hunt a cool spot, we’ll have a near beer or something and talk this thing over.”
Over their near beer Gary found the man he had intended to lick even more disarming. Monty Girard kept looking at him with covert intentness.
“Gary Marshall, you said your name was? I reckon yuh-all must be the fellow that done that whirlwind riding in a picture I saw, last time I was in town. I forget the name of it—but I shore don’t forget the way yuh-all handled your hawse. A range rider gets mighty particular about the riding he sees in the movies. I’ll bet yuh-all never learned in no riding school, Mr. Marshall; I’ll bet another glass uh near beer you’ve rode the range some yourself.”
“I was born on the Pecos,” grinned Gary. “My old man had horses mostly; some cattle, of course. I left when I was eighteen.”
“And that shore ain’t been so many years it’d take all day to count ’em. Well, I shore didn’t expect to meet that fellow I saw in the picture, on my next trip in to town.”
Gary drank his beer slowly, studying Monty Girard. Somehow he got the impression that Girard did not welcome the subject of Johnnywater. Yet he had seemed sincere enough in declaring that he had told the truth in the affidavit. Gary pushed the glass out of his way and folded his arms on the table, leaning a little forward.
“Just where’s the joker in this Johnnywater deal?” he asked abruptly. “There is one, isn’t there?”
“Wel-l—you’re going out there, ain’t yuh?” Monty Girard hesitated oddly. “I don’t know as there’s any joker at all; not in the way yuh-all mean. It’s a long ways off from the railroad, but Waddy wrote that in his letter to Mr. Connolly. I know that for a fact, because I read the letter. And uh course, cattle is down now—a man’s scarcely got a livin’ chance runnin’ cattle, the way the market is now. But Mr. Connolly must uh known all that. The price Waddy put on the outfit could uh told ’im that, if nothin’ else. I dunno as Waddy overcharged Connolly for the place. All depends on whether a man wanted to buy. Connolly did—I reckon. Leastways, he bought.”
“Yes, I see your point. The deal was all right if a man wanted the place. But you’re wondering what kind of a man would want the place. It’s a lemon of some kind. That’s about it—stop me if I’m wrong.”
Monty Girard laughed dryly. “I’m mounted on a tired hawse, Mr. Marshall. I couldn’t stop a run-down clock, and that’s a fact.”
“Well, I think I’ll go out with you if you don’t mind. I suppose I’ll need blankets and a few supplies.”
“Well, I reckon Waddy left pretty much everything he had out there. Soon as he got his money at the bank he fanned it for Merrie England. He just barely had a suit case when I saw him last. I reckon maybe yuh-all better take out a few things you’d hate to get along without. Flour, bacon an’ beans you can pretty well count on. And, unless yuh-all want to take blankets of your own, you needn’t be afraid to use Waddy’s. Frank Waddell was shore a nice, clean housekeeper, and a nice man all around, only—kinda nervous.”
Gary listened, taking it all in. His eyes, trained to the profession of putting emotions, thoughts, even things meant to be hidden, into the human face, so that all might see and read the meaning, watched Monty’s face as he talked.
“Just what is it that made Waddell sell the Johnnywater ranch and clear out of the country?” he asked. “Just what makes you hate the place?”
Monty sent him a startled look.
“I never said I hated it,” he parried. “It ain’t anything to me, one way or the other.”
“You do hate it. Why?”
“Wel-l—I dunno as I can hardly say. A man’s got feelin’s sometimes he can’t hardly put into words. Lots of places in this country has got histories, Mr. Marshall. I guess—Johnnywater’s all right. Waddy was a kind of nervous cuss.”