Those were the days of the ten- and sixteen-horse wagons that crawled up through the hot country; horses harnessed in long strings, two abreast, and driven by the “long-line skinner” who sat in a saddle on one of the “wheelers” and controlled the team by jerks on a long line. The leaders had bells attached to their collars so that any one coming along the road from an opposite direction could be apprised of the big freighter that was crawling along the grade.
Then had come the change. The mines on the mesa had closed down, and the town of Greasewood had become a ghost town with only a few desert rats making headquarters in the deserted buildings.
The desert closed in and claimed the once prosperous mining community for its own, engulfed it in vast silence. Then the crash in the stock market started the depression, and the depression had placed a premium upon gold. Once more the yellow metal was king. Greasewood once more became a city.
The outstanding event of the gold boom in Greasewood was the reopening of the Bleaching Skull Mine. A New York concern sent out some laborers who went into the old tunnels and started to burrow into the face of the rock along the line of a drift which had been abandoned years before.
Within the first fifty feet they had struck the rich vein of ore which had faulted out back in 1906. Excitement raced across the desert, fanned to a white-hot, fever heat. Prospectors poured into the city of Greasewood by the score.
The mine was taking out ore that was literally studded with the yellow metal; ore that was known in mining parlance as “jewelry rock.”
My roan plugged steadily up the long, deep grade as the purple shadows filled the valley. Higher and higher we wound up into the land of the distorted peaks. Gaudy-colored rock outcroppings caught the glint of the setting sun and transformed the country into a riot of color.
I turned off of the trail, angled down a slope, and found a little valley in which I could make camp. I wasn’t anxious to camp too close to the trail which led out from Greasewood.
That night the desert talked.
A wind sprang up from nowhere and whisked around the weird peaks with whistling noises, swooped down upon the sandy slopes, picked up little particles of sand, and sent them scurrying along, rattling against sage and cacti, giving the effect of some weird, hissing whisper which filled the darkness.
People who have lived much in the desert are familiar with this desert talk which comes at night.
I lay and listened to the sand talk, watched the stars quietly wheeling across the heavens, and dropped off into dreamless sleep.
I was up with daylight, saddled, packed, and away. By seven o’clock I topped the pass and could look down upon the mesa where the town of Greasewood held forth.
Many of the old houses were so dilapidated as to be unfit for human habitation, and their places had been taken by tents which had been packed in on horseback and flung up here and there, little blobs of white which caught the rays of the morning sun.
The smoke from cooking fires rose straight up for the first hundred feet or so until it struck an area of lighter air and spread out in a blanket of haze which covered the valley.
As I rode closer I could hear the voices of men, the laughter of children, and the lower tones of women. The sides of the hills were scarred with mining dumps, long pack trains were commencing to shuffle out over the road, and men on horseback loped about, starting the business of the day.
I dropped down off of the last slope, and put my horses at a lope as I went along the side street, past the tents, where children came to stare at me curiously.
I rode directly to an unpainted, rather ramshackle building which had stood for more than a quarter of a century without attention. It had been fixed up by such patchwork as was necessary to make it habitable, and over the door was a board upon which had been lettered by an unskilled hand: “THE BLEACHING SKULL MINING COMPANY. GENERAL OFFICES.”
A man came shuffling to the door when he heard the hoofs of my horses on the road, and stared at me with uncordial eyes.
“I’m Bob Zane,” I told him, “and I want to see Frank Atwood.”
The man looked at me for a moment, turned without a word, and vanished into the interior. I swung from the saddle and dropped the reins over my horse’s head, tied the lead rope of the packhorse to a rail.
There were quick steps on the board floor, and a young, well-knit man in khaki and polished puttees came bursting out into the morning, his face wreathed in smiles, his hand extended.
“Welcome to Greasewood, Bob Zane!” he exclaimed, and pumped my hand up and down.
“You’re Atwood?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Frank Atwood, manager of the mine here. They wrote me that you were coming.”
“Where do I stay?” I asked him. “And where can we talk?”
“We can talk right here, and we’d better talk before you pick a place to stay. Let’s come in here. I’ve got a private office where we can go over things.”
He led the way into a private office, ensconced himself importantly at a desk, and indicated a chair.
I dropped into the chair, tilted back against the wall and rolled a smoke, and sized him up.
He wasn’t a desert man. He was city bred, a college-trained mining engineer.
“Before we start talking,” I told him, “I want to get in touch with the sheriff.”
“What’s the trouble?” he asked.
“Nothing in particular,” I said, “except a dead man on the trail. Somebody had done him in from ambush with a .303 rifle. The fellow who did the job was a good shot.”
Frank Atwood stared at me. “Another murder?” he said.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know about the ‘another’ part of it,” I told him, “but it sure is a murder.”
“You don’t know who the man was?” he asked.
“No. Some fellow who was traveling out of Greasewood with a saddle burro and a single pack.”
“I wonder who it could have been?”
I didn’t make any suggestions, but contented myself with putting the finishing touches on my cigarette and striking a match to the end. Atwood got up and strode to the door. He jerked it open and said in a low voice: “Sproul, will you go and round up the sheriff for me? Get him here right away.”
A voice grumbled an answer.
I filed away in my mind, for future reference, the fact that this man, Sproul, stayed pretty close to the door of Frank Atwood’s private office when there was a conference going on.
Atwood came back and sat down.
“Where was the man shot?” he asked.
“Right through the heart,” I said.
“You couldn’t tell anything about the motive?”
“No.”
“Do you know how long he’d been dead?”
“Sometime around about noon yesterday was when he got his. I came along about three or four o’clock.”
“How near the main road?”
“About four hundred yards, but you couldn’t see it from the road.”
He looked at me and sighed, and then fidgeted uneasily in his chair.
“I understand that the directors sent you in,” he said, “with unlimited authority to take such action as you see fit.”
I puffed on the cigarette and said:
“The directors told me to cooperate with you.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, “of course. That’s understood. But I mean that you are to have a free hand in regard to methods.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re generally familiar with conditions here, I take it.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I told him. “I haven’t been here for years.”
“We’re contending with all sorts of lawlessness,” he said. “We haven’t got our transportation facilities opened up yet. We’re getting out a lot of high-grade ore, and we have a payroll which we have to meet. All of that makes for trouble. We’re being troubled with bandits and an element of lawlessness that the sheriff doesn’t seem able to handle.”