Nell Hastings ran the little restaurant there, and did a rushing business with it, too. There wasn’t a table in the place, just a long counter that ran the length of the building, with a stove at one end, a cash register at the other. Both were kept busy.
The mining camp had sprung into a boom with the rush of interest in the gold bearing properties that lay round about. Talk about a shortage of gold! Nevada’s lousy with it. Let conditions get to a point where labor and raw materials are down in price, and it pays to work mines that have long lain dormant. The gold’s there, tons of it. It costs too much money to get it out the way conditions are ordinarily.
Now we were having a gold boom that was like the old days. The camp was running full blast. The pound of the stamps in the mills furnished an undertone of rhythmic noise which jarred the placid silence of the desert. The big mines were working full shifts, and prospectors outfitted to disappear in the desert, their places being taken by silent men who came shuffling in from the great spaces, a string of thin burros plodding behind them.
Nell brought me some roast beef.
“You can always count on that,” she said.
“And you,” I told her.
She grinned and got me some coffee.
“Business good, Nell?”
“And how! I’m so tired my feet ache.”
“That’s good. About the business, I mean — not the feet.”
She started to say something, and then held her breath as the door banged open. A man was weaving about on the threshold of the place.
He was covered with desert dust. His eyes were gray, seemed to be dust covered themselves. But the places which should have been white were all flecked with red. There was a growth of stubble all over his face and neck, a white, bristly stubble that was inches long and made his face look like two red-rimmed bloodshot eyes peering out of a white mop.
Back of the tangle of white bristle that masked his mouth I could get a glimpse of something that was swollen blackish purple. I knew it for the tip of his tongue. He’d been without water, and, if the bony frame was any indication, he’d been without food.
I took that one first, swift look at him, and knew the symptoms. I had sprung to his side by the time he started to fall. He tried to speak, and couldn’t. Then his eyes closed and he lay still in my arms, a little wisp of a man who was so frail it seemed a good breath of desert wind would blow him away.
And yet he’d been out in the desert, fighting it for days, perhaps weeks, and he’d won back to civilization.
“Quick, Nell,” I said, “some sort of fruit juice first. A little hot soup later. Some orange juice if you have it, and a can of tomatoes. We’ll drain off the juice.”
She didn’t say a word, but just went back of the counter, all swift motions, all flying hands and deft fingers. That was Nell. You could count on her to back you up in any sort of an emergency.
The gambler came over and stared curiously. Just from the way he looked I could tell that he was new to the desert.
“Been out of water and food,” I explained to the gambler. “Even if he’d had food, he couldn’t have eaten it without the water. You can see where he came from.”
And I nodded my head toward the country that was visible from the open door of the restaurant shack.
It was desert, a mountain desert that showed naked, stark and cruel. There wasn’t anything that even resembled a tree, not even the desert palms that grow in some of the more fertile stretches of desert. There was just the great expanse of glittering, eye-aching space, tumbled into cruel crags, twisting cañons, and sharp cliffs. There was sage and greasewood, little stunted plants that dotted the desert.
Here and there the steep slopes were scarred by mines, many of which were deserted. There were tumbledown shacks that had lain in crumbling decay ever since the gay nineties. And the nineties had been gay in this camp. Make no mistake about that!
Another man came through the door. Pedro Gonzales, sort of Man-Friday to Pete Blaine, the manager of the big mine that kept the town going.
He stared at the spectacle of the man who was stretched out, the gambler and myself bending over him.
I opened the man’s shirt at the neck, took a glass of water and a spoon, and trickled slow drops of water on the swollen, cracked lips, the big, blackish tongue.
Something fell out of the shirt, a something that thudded as it fell. A thong came loose, and the floor was cascaded with bits of yellow metal.
Men who live with gold a lot get so they can tell much from it.
Those chunks of gold were placer, and they’d come from a field that was rich, the sort of a strike that makes the desert quiver with excitement, and makes towns spring up like mushrooms. There were coarse grains and nuggets that were hardly rounded down.
It looked like gold that started at the surface of the sand and went down clear through to hardpan.
I made a dive for the dirt-glazed buckskin sack and put the gold back in it, fastened the thong around the neck of the sack, and stuffed it down the front of the shirt again.
Then I knew why it had fallen out so easily. There were other sacks in there, and there was a leather belt with pockets down next to the skin.
I tried to get the shirt back in place.
But, when I looked up, I saw the eyes of Pedro Gonzales, and the eyes of the gambler. Neither pair of eyes had missed anything.
“Where did he come from this hombre?” asked Pedro.
“Lord knows,” I said. “He staggered in out of the desert somewhere. And, look you, he was suffering, but he didn’t stop any passer-by and ask for help. He used the last bit of remaining strength he had to walk into a public restaurant. Then the smell of the food and the knowledge he had won out snapped the nerve tension, and he keeled over.”
Pedro nodded. His eyes were squinted and glittering.
The gambler said: “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s going to pull around all right after a while. He ain’t so far gone. I’ve seen ’em worse. He’s had a hard fight and it’s jarred him, but he’s a desert rat, and he’s got the constitution of an ox.”
Nell came with the tomato juice. We dropped little doses of it in the lips we’d pried apart, and saw the throat make convulsive gulps, having difficulty swallowing the liquid because the throat and tongue were so swollen.
“The last thing this man wanted,” I said, “was a crowd around him. He didn’t want any one to see the things that we’ve seen. How about it, boys? Shall we get him some place out of the way and agree to forget what we’ve seen?”
Pedro Gonzales was of the desert, and his answer was prompt.
“That,” he said, “is agreed. We can take him to my room.”
The gambler hesitated a moment, then he said:
“Of course, it’s not my business, and I’m not in the habit of speaking of those things which are not my business.”
Nell looked at me.
“Taking him anywhere, the way he is now, will attract too much attention. I’ve got my tent out here in back. Put him there. There’s a cot.”
We carried him around behind the counter, out through the little screen door in the back to the tent where Nell lived. It was a little affair with a board floor and sides, canvas above that and over the top. She’d fixed it up with those little touches of feminine skill which made the place seem comfortable and homelike, for all it was nothing but a tent house thrown up in a rough mining camp where there was nothing in the way of conveniences.
The man was dirty. He was covered with the grime of the desert, and no one knew the first thing about his past or who he was. But Nell unhesitatingly had us put him down on her bed, and said to me: