The little trail twisted and turned, detouring the cactus patches, making it seem as if they were walking through the desert itself.
In a little cove in the cacti, a very small fire was burning in a rock fireplace on top of which had been placed a couple of strips of iron. Straddling these iron strips, a fire-blackened agateware stewpan emitted little puffs of steam as the boiling contents elevated the lid in spasmodic jerks.
Beside the fire, squatting on his heels, watching the flame with an intensity of concentration, was a man of perhaps fifty-five. And despite the fact that he was thin, he seemed to have gone soft. The flesh had sagged under his eyes, dropped down on cheeks and chin. In repose, the lips seemed flabby and a little blue. Only when he looked up and his visitors caught the steel-gray impact of his eyes was it apparent that while the body had gone soft the soul within the man was hard as nails.
He straightened up. A smile lighted his face, his pearl-gray cowboy hat came off in a sweeping bow.
Salty Bowers said succinctly, “This is him,” and then after a moment. “The girl’s the secretary... I’ll watch the beans.”
Salty moved over to the fire and assumed a squatting position, sitting on the heels of his boots looking as though he could be comfortable in that position for hours. His attitude was that of a man whose duty has been done.
Mason shook hands.
“You’re just in time for a little bite of lunch — in case you can eat plain prospector’s grub,” Banning announced, glancing surreptitiously at Della Street.
“I’d love it,” she said.
“There aren’t any chairs, but you don’t need to scrape away the sand to make certain there isn’t a sidewinder in the place where you’re going to sit. Just sit down.”
“You seem to have quite a little desert of your own here,” Mason said by way of making conversation.
Clarke grinned. “You haven’t seen it all, yet. How about taking a look around my little domain before you sit down?”
Mason nodded.
Clarke led them around a large clump of cactus into another little cactus-enclosed alcove. Here, two burros stood with heads lowered, long ears drooping forward. A couple of worn packsaddles were on the ground, together with a litter of pack boxes, ropes, a tarpaulin, a pick, shovel and gold pan.
“Surely,” Mason said, “you don’t use these here?”
“Well,” Clarke said, “we do and we don’t. The outfit belongs to Salty. He couldn’t be happy away from his burros and I don’t think they’d be happy away from him. And somehow you wake up feeling better if a burro bugles you awake than when you just sleep yourself out. Now, over here — right over around this trail, if you will, please. Now over here we have—”
Banning Clarke abruptly ceased talking, whirled to face Mason and Della Street, lowered his voice almost to a whisper, spoke with swift rapidity. “Don’t ever mention this in front of Salty. They’ve set a trap for him — a woman. Once this woman marries him, she’ll live with him a couple of months, sue him for a divorce, and either grab his stock or tie it up in litigation. He’s absolutely loyal. He’ll do anything I ask him. I’ve told him I want him to pool his stock in a certain mining company with mine. The minute that woman finds out she can’t get control of the stock, she’ll never marry him. He doesn’t know this — why I’m doing it. He doesn’t understand what’s back of all this, but once this woman realizes that stock has been tied up so she can t get her hands on it she’d no more think of marrying him than she would of jumping into a hot furnace. Don’t say anything about this.”
Almost immediately Clarke raised his voice and said, “And this is our bedroom.”
He indicated another little sanded alcove. Two bedrolls were neatly spread out in the shade of a big cactus.
“Some day I’m going to move out of here and back into the real desert. It won’t be today, tomorrow, or the next day, but I’m starved for the desert. I don’t suppose I can explain it so you’ll understand.”
“Salty gave us a pretty good explanation,” Mason said.
“Salty isn’t much on using words.”
“He’s pretty good at conveying ideas, though,” Mason observed.
“Ever hear of the Louie-Legs Mine?” Clarke asked abruptly.
“I don’t believe I have. Rather an unusual name, isn’t it?”
“It’s the name of that burro over there. We named the mine after him. It was a good strike. Salty sold out his interest to a syndicate, got fifty thousand and blew it all in. A few months later he woke up one morning stony broke.”
“Oh,” Della Street exclaimed sympathetically.
There was a twinkle in Banning Clarke’s gray eyes as he shifted them to Della. “That,” he announced, “was the sensible thing to do. That’s what I should have done.”
Mason chuckled.
“You see,” Clarke went on, “we get a warped perspective on money. Money isn’t worth a thing except to use in buying something. And money can’t buy anything better than the life of a prospector. There’s something back in a prospector’s subconscious mind that realizes this. That’s why so many of them try to get rid of money as quickly as possible. I hung onto my money. It was a mistake.”
“Go on,” Mason said, “you’re beginning to say something.”
“I kept my interest in the mine,” Clarke said. “I should have thrown it away. That mine kept getting richer the more we developed it. The syndicate that had purchased Salty’s share tried to freeze me out. We had litigation. Then one of the members of the syndicate died. I picked up his stock. That gave me control. After that I got the other shares. I called Salty in one day and told him I’d bought his stock back for him. I told him I’d give him some and hold the rest in trust. He almost cried with gratitude. For a month he lived here with me and everything was fine. Then he went on a bat again and came back broke. This time he was so ashamed he couldn’t face me. He disappeared into the desert.
“Then I saw a chance to make some more money. I organized the Come-Back Mining Syndicate, started buying up old mines, developing them and bringing them back. It was a hectic life. My wife had social aspirations. I found myself living in a huge house, attending functions for which I cared nothing, eating heavy meals of rich food — Oh well, there’s no need to go into that.
“I’d been a plunger all my life, but I’d made good on my gambles. My wife disapproved of the wild chances I took, so I put virtually all of my property in her name. Then I wanted to go hunt up Salty and go back into the desert. The fact that I even thought of such a thing shocked and hurt her. She wasn’t well at the time. I stayed on. She died. Her will left all of her separate property to her mother, Lillian Bradisson, and to her brother, James Bradisson. I don’t think she had ever anticipated the effect of that will. Because I was the producer she thought I was rich. She didn’t realize that inasmuch as that stock had been a gift, she had left me broke. I went to court, claiming that the stock was really community property, kept in my wife’s name for her protection.”
“And you want me to represent you in that case?” Mason asked with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.
“No,” Clarke said. “The case was settled. The judge who tried it suggested it would be a good thing if we’d quit fighting and split the stock sixty-forty. We did that. There’d been hard feelings engendered over the litigation. Jim Bradisson, my brother-in-law, thinks he’s a business genius. He’d never amounted to anything, but always claimed it was because he’d been hounded by bad luck. My wife was a lot younger than I. He’s only thirty-five, cocksure of himself, conceited. You know the type.”
Mason nodded.
“My wife’s death, the life I’d been leading, the worries, and then that litigation coming on top of everything else was too much for me. I broke all at once. My heart went bad. My nerves went to pieces. Salty heard I was sick, and showed up. Then a peculiar thing developed. It turned out that the stock I’d set aside for Salty, holding it in trust for him, represented the controlling interest in the company.