Читать книгу The Heart of Canyon Pass - Holmes Thomas K. - Страница 7

The high-springed stagecoach lurched drunkenly over the trail that wound through a valley Betty thought gnomes might have hewn out when the world was young. Barren, riven rock, gaunt, stunted trees, painted cliffs hazed by distance, all added to a prospect that fell far short in the Eastern girl’s opinion of being picturesque.

Rather, it was just what her brother had termed this Western country – raw. Betty did not like any rude thing. She shrank instinctively from anything crude and unfinished.

The three – herself, her brother, and Joe Hurley – occupied the seat on the roof of the plunging coach just behind the driver. “Lizard Dan” was an uncouth individual both in speech and appearance. He was bewhiskered, overalled, wore broken boots and an enormous slouched hat, and his hands were so grimy that Betty shuddered at them, although they so skillfully handled the reins over the backs of six frisky driving-mules.

Lizard Dan, Hurley told the Easterners, had gained his nickname when he was a pocket-hunter in a now far-distant day. He had been lost in the desert at one time and swore when he came out that he had existed by eating Crotaphytus Wislizeni roasted over a fire of dry cacti – the succulence of which saurian is much doubted by the Western white man, although it is a small brother of the South American iguana, there considered a delicacy.

However, Dan acquired a nickname and such a fear of the desert thereby that he became the one known specimen of the completely cured desert rat. He never went prospecting again, but instead drove the stage between Crescent City and Canyon Pass.

“The boys expecting us at the Pass to-day, Dan?” Joe Hurley had asked early in the journey.

“Youbetcha!”

“Got your gun loaded?”

Dan kicked the heavy double-barreled shotgun at his feet and replied again:

“Youbetcha!”

“Do – do wild animals infest the road?” Betty had asked stammeringly.

“Not much,” said Hurley. “But Dan carries a heap of registered mail in which wild men, rather than wild animals, might be interested.”

“Youbetcha!” agreed Dan.

Hurley glanced sideways at Betty’s face, caught its expression, and exploded into laughter.

“You’ve come to ‘Youbetcha Land,’ Miss Betty,” he said, when he could speak again.

“He is a character,” chuckled Hunt on her other side.

The suggestion of highwaymen stuck in the girl’s mind. She looked from Lizard Dan’s weapon to the ivory butt of the heavy revolver pouched at Joe Hurley’s waist. These weapons could not be worn exactly for show – an exhibition of the vanity of rather uncouth minds. It fretted her though without frightening her, this phase of Western life. It was not the possibility of gun-fights and brawls and the offices of Judge Lynch that made Betty Hunt shrink from contact with this country and its people.

The stagecoach mounted out of the valley – which might, Hunt said, have been fittingly described by Ezekiel – and followed a winding trail through the minor range of hills that divided Crescent City and its purlieus from the Canyon Pass country. The coach pitched and rocked as though it was a sea-going hack.

In time they crossed the small divide and came down the watershed into the valley of the East Fork.

Borne to their ears on the breeze at last, through the sound of the rumbling coach-wheels and the rattling trace-chains, was another noise. A throbbing rhythm of sound with the dull swish of intermittent streams of water.

“The hydraulic pumps at the Eureka Washings,” explained Hurley. “We’ll be in sight of them – and of Canyon Pass – before very long.”

The stagecoach lurched around a corner, and the raw, red bench of the riverbank came into view. Steam pumps were noisily at work and men were busy at the sluices into which the gold-bearing earth and gravel were washed down from the high bank.

Three great, brass-nozzled hydraulic “guns” were at work – each machine straddled by a man in oil-skins and hip boots, who manipulated the heavy stream of water that ate into the bank and crumbled it in sections.

At the moment of their sighting the hydraulic washings across the river, there was raised a wild, concerted shout from a point ahead. Out of a hidden cove galloped a cavalcade of a dozen or more mounted men, who swept up the road to meet the coach.

For an instant Betty thought of the shotgun at Dan’s feet and of highwaymen. These coming riders waved guns and yelled like wild Indians. But she saw a broad grin on Joe Hurley’s face.

“Here come some of the Great Hope boys,” he explained. “Their idea of ‘welcome to our city’ may be a little noisy, but they mean you well, Hunt.”

They came “a-shootin’,” and Lizard Dan threw the long lash of his whip over the backs of his six mules to force them through the cavalcade on the gallop.

Firing their guns and yelling, the riders on their wiry ponies surrounding the coach as its escort, pounded down to the ford. Their hullabaloo announced far in advance the approach of the coach to Canyon Pass.

In all its ugliness the mining camp was revealed. The gaze of the Easterners was focused on its unpainted shacks and rutted streets. They saw men, women, children, and a multitude of dogs running from all points toward the main thoroughfare of the town.

It was like a picture – not like anything real. Betty’s dazed mind could not accept this nightmare of a place as actually being the town to which fate – and her brother’s obstinacy – had brought them. Given an opportunity right then, the girl would have failed her brother! She was in a mood to desert him and return East as fast as she could travel.

Joe Hurley grinned at her. She had begun almost to hate those twinkling brown eyes of his with the golden sparks in them. He seemed to know just what her feelings were and to enjoy her horror of the crudity which assailed her on every hand. To her mind, Hurley was worse than his associates, for he had enjoyed the advantages of some culture.

The mules dashed into the shallows. Spray flew as high as the roof of the coach. The mules settled into a heavier pace as they dragged the vehicle up the farther bank and into the foot of Main Street.

The crowd – a couple of hundred people of all ages – had gathered before the Wild Rose Hotel. This stood opposite the bank and farther along the street than the Three Star Grocery and Boss Tolley’s Grub Stake. The mules picked up their heels again under the cracking of Lizard Dan’s whiplash, and cantered up to the chief hostelry of Canyon Pass. The yelling crew of horsemen – a bizarre committee of welcome indeed – rode ahead, punctuating their vociferous clamor by an occasional pistol-shot.

Betty caught sight of her brother’s face. It was as broadly smiling as was that of Joe Hurley! Actually Ford was enjoying this awful experience.

The moment Dan drew the mules to a halt, Hurley was half way to the ground and turned on the step to help Betty down. She glanced timidly at Hunt again. He was preparing to descend on the other side of the coach, leaving her entirely to Hurley’s care.

Then occurred that incident which would ever be engraved upon Betty’s memory, and which marked indeed the coming of the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt to Canyon Pass on the archives of the town’s history in letters that never would be effaced.

As Hunt started to descend from the roof of the coach there sounded a single pistol-shot and the hat he wore – a low-crowned affair, the single mark of the cleric in his dress – sailed into the air with a ragged hole through brim and crown.