Treasure and Trouble Therewith by Geraldine Bonner (top e book reader .txt) 📕

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

JOHN BONNER

WHO, HIMSELF A WRITER, TRAINED ME IN THE WORK HE LOVED. WHAT MERIT THE READER MAY FIND IN THESE PAGES IS THE RESULT OF THAT TRAINING, UNDERTAKEN WITH A FATHER'S PRIDE, CARRIED ON WITH A FATHER'S BELIEF AND ENCOURAGEMENT.

GERALDINE BONNER

CONTENTS


I. HANDS UP

II. THE TULES

III. MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE

IV. THE DERELICT

V. THE MARKED PARAGRAPH

VI. PANCHA

VII. THE PICAROON

VIII. THOSE GIRLS OF GEORGE'S

IX. GREEK MEETS GREEK

X. MICHAELS THE MINER

XI. THE SOLID GOLD NUGGET

XII. A KISS

XIII. FOOLS IN THEIR FOLLY

XIV. THE NIGHT RIDER

XV. THE LAST DINNER

XVI. THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

XVII. THE WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

XVIII. OUTLAWED

XIX. HALF TRUTHS AND INFERENCES

XX. MARK PAYS A CALL

XXI. A WOMAN SCORNED

XXII. THEREBY HANGS A TALE

XXIII. THE CHINESE CHAIN

XXIV. LOVERS AND LADIES

XXV. WHAT JIM SAW

XXVI. PANCHA WRITES A LETTER

XXVII. BAD NEWS

XXVIII. CHRYSTIE SEES THE DAWN

XXIX. LORRY SEES THE DAWN

XXX. MARK SEES THE DAWN

XXXI. REVELATION

XXXII. THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT

XXXIII. THE MORNING THAT CAME

XXXIV. LOST

XXXV. THE UNKNOWN WOMAN

XXXVI. THE SEARCH

XXXVII. HAIL AND FAREWELL



CHAPTER I


HANDS UP

The time was late August some eleven years ago. The place that part of central California where, on one side, the plain unrolls in golden levels, and on the other swells upward toward the rounded undulations of the foothills.

It was very hot; the sky a fathomless blue vault, the land dreaming in the afternoon glare, its brightness blurred here and there by shimmering heat veils. Checkered by green and yellow patches, dotted with the black domes of oaks, it brooded sleepily, showing few signs of life. At long intervals ranch houses rose above embowering foliage, a green core in the midst of fields where the brown earth was striped with lines of fruit trees or hidden under carpets of alfalfa. To the west the foothills rose in indolent curves, tan-colored, as if clothed with a leathern hide. Their hollows were filled with the darkness of trees huddled about hidden streams, ribbons of verdure that wound from the mountains to the plain. Farther still, vision faint, remote and immaculate, the white peaks of the Sierra hung, a painting on the drop curtain of the sky.

Across the landscape a parent stem of road wound, branches breaking from it and meandering thread-small to ranch and village. It was white-dusted here, but later would turn red and crawl upward under the resinous dimness of pine woods to where the mining camps clung on the lower wall of the Sierra. Already it had left behind the region of farms in neighborly proximity and the little towns that were threaded along it like beads upon a string. Watching its eastward course, one would have noticed that after it crested the first rise it ran free of habitation for miles.

Along its empty length a dust cloud moved, a tarnishing spot on the afternoon's hard brightness. This spot was the one point of energy in the universal torpor. From it came the rhythmic beat of flying hoofs and the jingle of harness. It was the Rocky Bar stage, up from Shilo through Plymouth, across the Mother Lode and then in a steep, straining grade on to Antelope and Rocky Bar, camps nestling in the mountain gorges. It was making time now against the slow climb later, the four horses racing, the reins loose on their backs.

There was only one passenger; the others had been dropped at towns along the route. He sat on the front seat beside Jim Bailey the driver, his feet on a pine box and a rifle across his knees. He and Jim Bailey knew each other well, for he had often come that way, always with his box and his rifle. He was Wells Fargo's messenger and his name was Danny Leonard. In the box at his feet were twelve thousand dollars in coin to be delivered that night to the Greenhide Mine at Antelope.

With nothing of interest in sight, talk between them was desultory. Jim Bailey thought they'd take on some men at Plymouth when they stopped there to victual up. The messenger, squinting at the swimming yellow distance, yawned and said it might be a good thing, nobody knew when Knapp and Garland would get busy again. They'd failed in the holdup of the Rockville stage last spring and it was about time to hear from them--the road after you passed Plymouth was pretty lonesome. Jim Bailey snorted contemptuously and spat over the wheel--he guessed Knapp and Garland weren't liable to bother _him_.

After this the conversation dropped. The stifling heat, the whirling dust clouds broken by whiffs of air, dry as from a kiln and impregnated with the pungent scent of the tarweed, made the men drowsy. Jim Bailey nodded, the reins drawing slack between his fingers. Leonard slipped the rifle from his knees to the floor and relaxed against the back of the seat. Through half-shut lids he watched the whitened crests of the Sierra brushed on the turquoise sky.

The horses clattered down a gulley and galloped across a wooden bridge that spanned a dead watercourse. The ascent was steep and they took it at a rush, backs humped, necks stretched, hoofs clattering among loosened stones.

A sudden breeze carried their dust ahead, and for a moment the prospect was obscured, the trees that filled the gulley, bunched at the summit into a thicket, just discernible in foggy outline. The horses had gained the level, Jim Bailey, who knew the road in his sleep, had cheered them with a familiar chirrup, when the leaders stopped, recoiling in a clatter of slackened harness on the wheelers. The stage came to a halt so violent that Jim Bailey lurched forward against the splashboard, the reins jerked out of his hands. He did not know what had happened, could see nothing but the horses' backs, jammed together, lines and traces slapping about their flanks.

Afterward, describing it at Mormons Landing, he laid it all to the dust. In that first moment of surprise he hadn't made out the men, and anyway who'd have expected it--on the open road in the full of the afternoon? You couldn't put any blame on him, sprawled on his knees, the whole thing coming so quick. When he picked himself up he looked into the muzzle of a revolver and saw behind it a head, only the eyes showing between the hat brim and a gunny sack tied round the lower part of the face.

After that it all went so swift you couldn't hardly tell. He didn't even then know there were two of them--heard the feller at the wheel say, "Hands up," and thought that was all there was to it--when the one at the horses' heads fired. Leonard had given an oath and reached for his gun, and right with that the report came, and Leonard heaved up with a sort of grunt, and then settled and was still. The other feller came along down through the dust, and Jim Bailey, paralyzed, with his hands up, knew Knapp and Garland had got him at last.

The one at the wheel kept him covered while the other pulled out the box. He could see him plain, all but his face, a big powerful chap, shoulders on him like a prize fighter's, and freckled hands covered with red hair. He got the box out with a jerk and dropped it, and then, snatching up a stick, struck the near wheeler a blow on the flank and jumped back into the bushes.

The horses started, mad, like they were locoed; it was a wonder the stage wasn't upset, racing this way and that, up the bank and down on the other side. Jim Bailey crawled out on the axle, picked up the dragging reins and got back just in time to keep Leonard from bouncing out. He heaved him up and held him round the body, and when he got the horses going straight, took a look at him. That first time he thought he was dead, white as chalk and with his eyes turned up. But after a spell of going he decided there was life in him yet, and holding him with one arm, stretched the other over the splashboard, shaking the reins on the wheelers' backs, and the way those horses buckled to their work was worth gettin' held up to see.

Half an hour later the Rocky Bar stage came like a cyclone into Mormons Landing, Jim Bailey hopping like a grasshopper on the front seat, and on his arm Danny Leonard, shot through the lung. They drew up in front of the Damfino Saloon, and Mormons Landing, dead among its deserted ditches, knew again a crowded hour of glorious life. Everybody came running and lined up along the sidewalk, later to line up along the Damfino Bar. The widow woman who ran the eating house put Danny Leonard in her own bed and sent one of her sons, aged six, to San Marco for a doctor, and the other, aged eight, to Jackson for the sheriff.

Before night fell the news had flashed through the countryside. On ranch piazza and in cabin doorway, in the camps along the Mother Lode and the villages of the plain, men were telling one another how Knapp and Garland had held up the Rocky Bar stage and got away with twelve thousand dollars in gold.


CHAPTER II


THE TULES

The place of the holdup was on the first upward roll of the hills. Farther back, along more distant slopes, the chaparral spread like a dark cloth but here there was little verdure. The rainless California summer had scorched the country; mounded summit swelled beyond mounded summit all dried to a uniform ochre. But if you had stood on the rise where the stage stopped and faced toward the west, you would have seen, stretching to the horizon, a green expanse that told of water.

This was the tules, a vast spread of marsh covered with bulrushes, flat as a floor, and extending from a distant arm of the bay back into the land. It was like a wedge of green thrust through the yellow, splitting it apart, at one end meeting the sky in a level line, at the other narrowing to a point which penetrated the bases of the hills. From these streams wound down ravine and rift till their currents slipped into the brackish waters of the marsh. Such a stream, dried now to a few stagnant pools, had worn a way along the gulley where the holdup had occurred.

Down this gulley, the box between them, the bandits ran. Alders and bay grew thick, sun spots glancing through their leaves, boughs slapping and slashing back from the passage of the rushing bodies, stones rolling under the flying feet. The heat was suffocating, the narrow cleft holding it, the matted foliage keeping out all air. The men's faces were empurpled, the gunny sacks about their necks were soaked with sweat. They spoke little--a grunt, a muttered oath as a stone turned. Doubled under the branches, crashing through a covert with closed eyes and warding arm,