The Trail of the White Mule | Page 6

onions

nor fish, nor play music after ten o'clock at night, nor do any loud
talking in the halls.
"Every day for a week Casey cooked cabbage, onions and fish. He sat
up nights to play the graphophone. He stayed home to talk loudly and
play bucking bronk with Babe all up and down the stairs and in the
halls. Our rent was paid for a month in advance, and the landlord was
too little and old to fight. So he sold out cheap--and it really was a good
stroke of business for us, though not deliberate
"Well-sir, at first we lost tenants who didn't enjoy the freedom of their
neighbors' homes. But really, Jack, you'd be surprised to know how
many people in this city just LOVE cabbage and onions and fish, and to
have children they needn't disown whenever they go house-hunting. I
had ventilator hoods put over every gas range in the house, and turned
the back yard into a playground with plenty of sand piles and swings. I
raised the price, too, and made the place look very select, with a roof
garden for the grown-ups. We have the house filled now with really
nice families--avoiding the garlic brand--and as an investment I
wouldn't ask for anything better.
"Casey enjoyed himself hugely while he was whipping things into
shape, but the last month he's been going stale. The tenants are all so
thankful to do as they please that they're excruciatingly polite to him,
no matter what he does or says. He's tired of the beaches and he has
begun to cuss the long, smooth roads that are signed so that he couldn't
get lost if he tried. It does seem as if there's no interest left in anything,
unless he can get a kick out of going to jail. And, Jack, I do believe he's
gone there."
The telephone rang and the Little Woman excused herself and went
into the hall, closing the door softly behind her.
I'm not greatly given to reminiscence, but while I sat and watched the
flames of civilization licking tamely at the impregnable iron bark of the
gas logs, the eyes of my memory looked upon a picture:
Desert, empty and with the mountains standing back against the sky,

the great dipper uptilted over a peak and the stars bending close for
very friendliness. The licking flames of dry greasewood burning, with a
pungent odor in my nostrils when the wind blew the smoke my way.
The far-off hooting of an owl, perched somewhere on a juniper branch
watching for mice; and Casey Ryan sitting cross-legged in the sand,
squinting humorously at me across the fire while he talked.
I saw him, too, bolting a hurried breakfast under a mesquite tree in the
chill before sunrise, his mind intent upon the trail; facing the desert and
its hardships as a matter of course, with never a thought that other men
would shrink from the ordeal.
I saw him kneeling before a solid face of rock in a shallow cut in the
hillside, swinging his "single-jack" with tireless rhythm; a tap and a
turn of the steel, a tap and a turn--chewing tobacco industriously and
stopping now and then to pry off a fresh bit from the plug in his hip
pocket before he reached for the "spoon" to muck out the hole he was
drilling.
I saw him larruping in his Ford along a sandy, winding trail it would
break a snake's back to follow, hot on the heels of his next adventure,
dreaming of the fortune that finally came. . . .
The Little Woman came in looking as if she had been talking with
Destiny and was still dazed and unsteady from the meeting.
"Well-sir, he's gone!" she announced, and stopped and tried to smile.
But her eyes looked hurt and sorry. "He has bought a Ford and a tent
and outfit since he left us down on Seventh and Broadway, and he just
called me up on long-distance from San Bernardino. He's going out on
a prospecting trip, he says. I'll say he's been going some! A speed cop
overhauled him just the other side of Claremont, he told me, and he
was delayed for a few minutes while he licked the cop and kicked him
and his motorcycle into a ditch. He says he's sorry he sassed me, and if
I can drive a car in this darned town and not spend all my loose change
paying fines, I'm a better man than he is. He doesn't know when he'll be
back--and there you are."

She sat down wearily on the arm of an over-stuffed armchair and
looked up at the gilt-and-onyx clock which I suspected Casey of having
bought. "If he isn't lynched before morning," she sighed whimsically,