“Close up the restaurant, will you, Bob? This man needs some one to be with him. I’m going to stick here.”
That’s the way of the desert.
The gambler spoke to me as we were going back to the restaurant. “You live here?”
“No. I live in the desert. I come and I go. I don’t live any one particular place. Just so it’s the desert.”
“You know the people here?”
“Some of them.”
“Know any one named Blaine?”
“Pete Blaine?” I asked.
“That’s the one.”
“Sure,” I said. “He’s the big chief up at the mine here. He has charge of the whole thing for the Desert Rand Syndicate. Pedro here can tell you anything you want to know about him. Pedro works for him, sort of assistant, you know. He’s usually with Blaine on the job.”
The gambler whirled to stare at Pedro Gonzales.
“Oh,” he said, “I see.”
“What was it you wanted to know?” asked Pedro.
“I thought I knew this man, Blaine, back in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Was he ever there, do you know?”
“I’ve heard him speak of it.”
“Fine!” said the gambler. “He’s the man I want. I’m quite certain I knew him there. I’m going to hunt him up.”
“I’ll tell him you’re looking for him,” said Pedro.
“Don’t,” the gambler said. “I want to see about getting a job from him, and I’d rather tackle him right out of a clear sky.”
I flashed an amused glance at the gambler’s hands.
They were soft as silk, and the fingers were as smoothly efficient as the fingers of a trained surgeon. I knew that those hands and the dexterity of those fingers were a good part of the gambler’s stock in trade.
“He only has jobs in the mine,” I said. “I think the office staff comes here from the outside. It’s all hired in New York, and then sent on here. They don’t do much office work, anyway, just time-keeping, and the checking of a few records. Most of the book-keeping is done in the East, you know.”
The gambler didn’t say anything. His silence indicated that whether he wanted to work in a mine or not was none of my business. I grinned and let it go at that. He was new to the desert.
We filed out to the street and separated.
II. Murder
A desert camp is a peculiar place, no matter how you take it.
This camp had lots of things in common with the camps of the early days. There are dozens of those places in Nevada right to-day, running full blast.
There were electric lights, and part of the place had running water. Some of the old-time houses were still in service, and there were some new ones put up out of boards and canvas. It was wide open.
Over all were the stars, the great, silent, unwinking stars that stared steadily down as they do in the desert. The camp was a blaze of light in the darkness of the desert night, a single bright spot that flared out into prominence and could be seen for miles.
All around it was the dark silence of the desert, black and mysterious, grim and cruel, the desert that has waited for always, and will always wait.
It seemed to mock at the puny efforts of these men whom the desert had trapped, surrounded in this little inclosure of light and noise. Here was light, water and food. Outside in the desert was darkness, thirst and death. The desert waited, patient, cruel, remorseless.
And it’s that which makes the desert the kindest mother a man ever had. The desert doesn’t save her weaklings. She’s as remorseless as the ocean. A mistake, and the desert strikes. Those who have lived with her are the ones who have learned the ways of the desert. That’s her law. Learn her ways or die. But once you learn to get along with the desert, you realize that cruelty is, after all, the highest form of kindness.
Say what you want to about the desert. Say what you want to about ruthless cruelty which strikes with deadly aim and baffling speed. But you’ll have to admit one thing. Take desert trained men, men who have lived with the desert and know her ways, and you’ll find men who have thrown aside the cloak of mediocrity and have developed character.
That, too, is the law of the desert.
I strolled about the camp, looking at the types.
There were men from the Rand mine, typical laborers of the mining type, heavy muscled, good natured adventurers of the open places, broad-minded, tolerant, slow to anger, but, when once aroused, fiends incarnate.
There were girls, imported girls who had come in from the outside, trekking across miles of desert to taxi-dance with the miners, giving those rough men of the open a feminine companionship without which man sooner or later goes mad.
There were gamblers, men who sat at tables, green eye-shades on their foreheads, their faces pale with the pallor of skin that is exposed much to the artificial light of the night and but little to the sunlight of day. These men sat calmly expressionless, their hands flashing in swift motion as they dealt cards, pushing chips out to the center of the table without an instant’s hesitation, or else throwing down their cards when a bet was made.
They never paused to consider in that lather of anxiety which marks the indecision of the amateur. They either had good enough cards to take a chance with or else they didn’t. If they took a chance they received the verdict of the showdown with faces that didn’t change a muscle. If they won, they raked in the chips. If they lost, they remained utterly motionless. They won without triumph, and lost without despair.
I was staring at a game of draw poker when a hand touched my arm.
It was Pete Blaine.
“I understand there was a man looking for me,” he said.
I remembered that the gambler had said he preferred to speak to Pete Blaine himself, and had asked us not to mention his inquiry. But Pedro Gonzales didn’t have any will of his own so far as Blaine was concerned.
“Seems to me I heard some one mention you.”
“Can you describe him, Bob?”
“Not very well. He was tall and dark, looked like a professional gamber.”
“Did he have a little scar over his right eye?”
I thought for a moment.
“Yes,” I said. “I believe he did. You know him, then?”
“No,” said Blaine. “I don’t know him, but Pedro told me about him and about the scar. I wondered if he had been mistaken.”
“He’s around town, somewhere,” I told him. “You’ll run on to him probably.”
He shook his head.
“No. That’s why I was asking the questions. There’s a big deal pending, and I’ve got some information from the mine that they have to have at once. I’m leaving within ten minutes. I’m going to drive over the Jawbone Cañon road and try and make the railroad by daylight. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, and if this man were really a friend of mine I’d like to have seen him before I leave.”
“I’ll tell him, if I see him,” I said.
“I wouldn’t bother,” he told me. “I’m satisfied it’s just another one of those drifters who want to make a pretense of former friendship in order to get some easy work.”
I nodded. I knew that the camp had its share of that type, men who were willing to work if the work wasn’t too hard, and the pay was plenty. The desert isn’t kind to men of that type. They drift, for the most part, around the cities.
Along about nine thirty, which is late for the desert, I decided that I’d stroll around and see how Nell was making it, and whether there was anything I could do to help her with her guest who had stumbled in out of the desert. I figured he’d have recovered enough to go to the ramshackle hotel and get a room by this time. Or he might have been one of those fellows who were hardy enough to pull out and make a camp in the open. For the most part the hotel housed the people from the outside. Your true desert dweller hates a roof over his head when he doesn’t need protection from rain — which is seldom in the desert.