Heart's Desire by Emerson Hough (comprehension books .TXT) 📕

In the street Heart's Desire waited patiently, gazing at the darkened house, at the shaded door. Half an hour passed, an hour. Dan Anderson, without speech to any one, walked slowly up the street and across the arroyo. The light in his own casita flickered briefly and then vanished.

"I told you all along he was game!" said Curly, emerging from the corner of Whiteman's store and offering everybody a chew from his plug of tobacco. "They ain't runnin' him any, I reckon. Huh?"

"Shucks!" remarked Uncle Jim, disgustedly. "From the way that feller Barkley roared around, I shore thought he was a-goin' to tear up the earth. He's so yellow that in the mornin' I'm goin' to tell him to move on out of town. I've always kep' a respectable house before now, and I never did harbor a man who wouldn't shoot some!"

"In the mornin'," added Doc Tomlinson, as the group broke up, "I'm goin' to take Dan Anderson that saddle of mine that's layin' around in my store. Why, what does a man want of a saddle in a drug store? I just want to give the boy something."

There was a barber at Heart's Desire, a patient though forgotten man, who had waited some years in the belief that eventually a patron would come into his shop in search of professional services. No one did come, but still the barber hoped. He was one of those who had clamored most loudly for Eastern Capital. After the town meeting the courage of the barber failed him. He declared himself as at length ready to abandon his faith in Heart's Desire, and to depart in search of a community offering conditions more encouraging. In this determination he was joined by Billy Hudgens of the Lone Star, a man also patient through long years of adversity, who now admitted that he might be obliged to close up and move to Arizona.

The news of these impending blows fell upon a community already gloomy and despondent. Some vague, intangible change had come over Heart's Desire. The illusion of the past was destroyed. Men rubbed their eyes, realizing that they had been asleep, that they had been dreaming. There dawned upon them the conviction that perhaps, after all, the old scheme of life had not been sufficient. The lotus plant was robbed of its potency.

It was at this time that McGinnis came to town. His advent was the most fortunate thing that could have happened. Certainly, it was hailed with joy and accepted as an omen; for, as was known of all men over a thousand miles of mining country in the Rockies, McGinnis was the image and emblem of good luck.

Not that this meant prosperity for McGinnis himself, for that gentleman continued in a very even condition as to worldly goods, being steadily and consistently broke,—a sad state of affairs for one who had brought so much happiness to others. History proved to the point of proverb that whenever McGinnis visited a camp,—and he had followed scores of strikes and stampedes in all the corners of the metalliferous world,—that camp was destined to witness a boom at no distant day.

McGinnis was not actually a newcomer at Heart's Desire, but upon the contrary one of the autochthones of that now decadent community. He was a friend and former bunk-mate of old Jack Wilson, discoverer of the Homestake mine. Five years ago, however, at the breaking of the Heart's Desire boom, he had silently stolen away, whether for Alaska or the Andes no one knew nor asked. Returning now as though from temporary absence, he punched an ancient and subdued burro into town, and unrolled his blankets behind Whiteman's corral, treating his return, as did every one else, entirely as a matter of course. Seeing these things, a renewed cheerfulness came to the lately despondent. Whiteman the Jew, ever a Greatheart, openly exulted, and voiced again his perennial confession of commercial faith in Heart's Desire.

"Keep your eye on Viteman," said he. "Der railroat may go, der barber may go, der saloon may go, but not Viteman. My chudgment is like it vas eight years ago. Dis stock of goots is right vere I put it. If no one don't buy it, I keeps it. I know my pizness. Should I put in twenty thousand dollars' vort of goots, and make a mistake of der blace vere a town should be? I guess not! Viteman stays. By and by der railroat comes to Viteman. You vatch. Keep your eye on Viteman."

He stood in the door of his long log store building, squat, stocky, bristling, blue shirted like the rest, and cast his eye down counters and shelves piled with clothing and hats, boots and gloves, pick-axes, long-handled shovels, saddles, spurs, wagon bows, flour, bacon, and all manner of things which come in tin cans. Dust was over all; but above the dust was expectancy and not despair. The Goddess of Progress had her choicest temple in the frontier store.

"I toll you poys years ago," Whiteman went on, "you should blat der town. Ve blat it oursellufs now. Ve don't act like childrens no more. Ve meet again. Ve holt a election. Ve make Viteman gounty dreasurer. Dan Anderson should be mayor, and McGinney glerk. Ve make a town gouncil, and ve go to vork like ve should ought to did. Ve move Nogales City over here and make dis der gounty seat. Ve bedition for a new gounty—ve don't vant to belong to dot Becos River gow outfit. Ve make a town for oursellufs. Viteman didn't put in dis stock of goots for noddings. You vatch Viteman."

This speech turned the tide, coming as it did with the arrival of McGinnis. Billy Hudgens decided to wait for a few more days, although for the time he was out of business for lack of liquids. It was fortunate that McGinnis did not know this latter fact.

The capital of McGinnis, aside from his freckles and his thirst, was somewhat limited. His blankets were thin and ragged, his pistol minus the most important portion of a revolver—to wit, the cylinder—and withal so rusted that even had it boasted all the component parts of a six-shooter, it could not have been fired by any human agency. He had a shovel, a skillet, and a quart tin cup. He had likewise a steel-headed and long-handled hammer, in good condition; this being, indeed, the only item of his outfit which seemed normal and in perfect repair. McGinnis was a skilled mechanic and a millwright and could use a hammer as could but few other men.

On the morning after his arrival McGinnis rolled early out of his blankets, ate his breakfast of flapjacks and water, and put his hammer in his hip pocket, where some men put a gun who do not know how to carry a gun. McGinnis spoke to no one in particular, but headed up into the mouth of the curving valley where stood the silent works of the New Jersey Gold Mills Company. He was not cast down because he found no one whom he could ask for work. He whistled as he walked through the open and barn-like building, looking about him with the eye of a man who had seen gold mills before that time.

"They've got their plates fixed at a lovely angle!" said he; "and there's about enough mercury on 'em to make calomel for a sick cat. There's been talent in this mill, me boy!"

He crawled up the ore chute into the bin, and cast a critical gaze upon the rock heaped up close to the crusher. Then he examined the battery of stamps with silent awe. "This," said McGinnis, softly to himself, "is the end of the whole and intire earth! Is it a confectionery shop they've got, I wonder? They do well to mash sugar with them lemon squeezers, to say nothing of the Homestake refractories."

He passed on about the mill in his tour of inspection, still whistling and still critical, until he came to the patent labor-saving ore crusher, which some inventor had sold to the former manager of the New Jersey Gold Mills Company, along with other things. McGinnis drifted to this instinctively, as does the born mechanician, to the gist of any problem in mechanics.

"Take shame to ye fer this, me man, whoivver ye were," said McGinnis, and the blood shot up under his freckles in indignation. "This is so bad it's not only unmechanical and unprofissional—it's absolutely unsportsmanlike!"

His ardor overcame him, and, hammer in hand, he swung down into the ore bin underneath the crusher. "Here's where it is," said he to himself. "With the jaw screwed that tight, how cud ye hope to handle this stuff—especially since the intilligent and discriminatin' mine-boss was sendin' down quartz that's more'n half porphyry! Yer little donkey injin, and yer little sugar mashers, and yer little lemon squeezer of a crusher—yah! It's a grocery store ye've got, and not a stamp mill. Loose off yer nut on the lower jaw, man; loose her off!" McGinnis was a man of action. In a moment he was tapping at the clenched bolt with the head of his bright steel hammer. Slowly at first, and sullenly, for it had long been used to treatment that McGinnis called "unsportsmanlike"; then gently and kindly as it felt the hand of the master, the head of the bolt began to turn, until at length the workman was satisfied. Then he turned also the corresponding nut on the opposite face of the jaw, swung the great steel jaw back to the place where he fancied it, and made all fast again. "She's but a rat-trap," said he to himself, "but it's only fair to give the rat-trap its show."

McGinnis went out and sat down upon a pile of ore. It was a bright and cloudless morning, such as may be seen nowhere in the world but in Heart's Desire. The Patos Mountains, across the valley, seemed so close that one might lay his hand upon them. The sun was bright and unwinking, and all the air so golden sweet that McGinnis pushed back his hat and gloried simply that he was alive. He did not even note the cottontail that came out from behind a bush to peer at him, nor mark the sweeping shadow of a passing eagle that swung high above the little valley. His eye now and again fell upon the abandoned mill, gaunt, idle and silent; yet he regarded it lazily, the spell of the spot and the languor of the air filling all his soul.

But at last the sun grew more ardent, and McGinnis, knowing the secret of the dry Southwest, sought shade in order that he might be cool. He rose and strolled again into the mill, looking about him as before, idly and critically. "Av ye was all me own, it's quite a coffee mill I cud make of ye, me dear," said he, familiarly. And at this moment a thought seemed to strike him.

"It has always been me dream to be a captain of industhry," soliloquized McGinnis. "I've always longed to hear the busy hum of me own wheels, and to feel that I was the employer and not merely the employeed." He mused for a few moments, too lazy to think far at one flight.

"It wud be nice," he resumed later, "to see the smoke of your own facthory ascendin' to the sky, and to feel that yerself 'uz the whole affair, cook and captain bold, ore shoveller, head ingineer, amalgamator and main squeeze."

"All