Читать книгу Clattering Hoofs - William MacLeod Raine - Страница 11

THE NAME OF JUG PACKARD CAME UP ONE EVENING WHILE the Ranger family were sitting with Cape Sloan on the porch facing the shadowy outlines of the Huachucas. The ranch guest had dropped a casual question to which he knew the answer.

“Yes,” replied John. “There’s right smart ore there. Copper, and some gold.”

“In paying values?”

“You must have heard of the Johnny B—near the mouth of Geronimo Gulch.”

“Seems to me I have. Is it locally owned?” Cape kept his voice indifferent. Nobody could have guessed by hearing him that he was doing more than making talk to pass time.

“Jug Packard holds a controlling interest.”

The young man stifled a yawn with his forefingers. The obvious lack of interest was fraudulent. He had not heard the name for years, but the sound of it set a pulse of excitement strumming in him. “Lives in New York, with an office on Wall Street, I reckon,” he suggested.

“No, sir. Lives at Tucson, when he isn’t at the mine, Mostly he stays right at Jugtown, where the works are. His family put on considerable dog at Tucson, but the old man dresses like he did when he didn’t have a nickel. A tramp wouldn’t say “Thank you” for anything Jug wears.”

“I see. An old-timer, a diamond in the rough.”

“An old-timer all right. He’s been here since Baldy was a hole in the ground, but I wouldn’t call him exactly a diamond or rave about his heart of gold.”

“A millionaire?”

“He’s got money enough to burn a wet mule.” Ranger added, after a moment: “Jug is a crabbed old tightwad. Hangs on to a dollar so hard he squeezes the eagle off it before he turns it loose.”

“But otherwise an estimable citizen,” Sloan commented. His sardonic face was in the shadow of the vines and told no tales.

“Hmp! Not unless rumor is a lying jade,” returned Ranger. He was a man who spoke his mind, and he did not like the mine owner. “I wouldn’t trust him farther than I could throw a bull by the tail. Some nasty stories about Jug have floated around. By the way, your friend Uhlmann used to be a foreman or pit boss or something or other for him.”

“Did he mention that he was my friend?” the younger man asked with frosty irony.

Ranger leaned back in his chair, drew on his pipe, and released the smoke slowly. “Jug came in as a mule skinner for a freight outfit,” he said. “The pachies ambushed the party on the Oracle road and would have got the whole caboodle if Bob Webb and two-three of his boys hadn’t happened along and drove them off. Jug was wounded, so Bob took him to Tucson and looked after the bills till he got on his feet again. They say Mrs. Webb nursed him. Anyhow, later Bob took him down to the Johnny B and gave him a job.”

“Mr. Packard seems to have made good there,” Sloan said dryly.

“Jug is one of those fellows born to make money. If he sees a dime around that isn’t nailed down he gets it. No doubt he saw right away that there was a fortune in the Johnny B. Jug is mighty competent, the kind that is bound to get to the top. Webb was kinda easy-going. He relied on Jug a lot. In three-four years he was superintendent and had a small interest in the mine. All he needed was that toe-hold.” The cattleman stopped talking. He put his boots on the porch railing and relaxed.

His daughter prodded him. She was in the lane of lamplight that streamed from the window of the parlor. “Well, go on,” she urged.

It was her eyes, Sloan decided, that quickened a personality interesting and exciting. They were shining now like pools of liquid fire. He did not know that she had divined intuitively that this story somehow concerned him greatly.

“Webb was killed when a charge exploded unexpectedly in one of the drifts,” her father continued. “After that Jug took charge, though Mrs. Webb still owned most of the property. He organized it into a stock company, and by that time he held the next biggest interest to Mrs. Webb. The mine ran into a streak of bad luck. They lost the pay vein, and none of the drifts seemed to have much ore. For a couple of years the Johnny B shut down. The stock went down to almost nothing. Jug bought it right and left, a good deal of it from Mrs. Webb, who had to get money to keep herself and her two kids. When the mine opened up again Jug owned nine-tenths of the stock. Almost right away they struck a bonanza.”

“Fortunate for Packard,” Sloan remarked.

The girl looked at him quickly. He was covering up carefully, but back of his arid reserve she read a deep bitterness. “You think Mr. Packard just happened to hit pay ore?” she asked.

“That’s his story. You can take it or leave it” Ranger’s resentment at the man exploded into words. “No, I think he pulled off some kind of shenanigan. Maybe he knew the ore was there and shut down to get control.”

“Who kept the mine books?” Sloan asked abruptly.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“He might have been looting the mine before it shut down—pocketing the profits so as to have enough to buy up the stock later.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him. Anyhow, he has the Johnny B, however he got it.”

“And Mrs. Webb—what did she do about it?” Sandra asked.

“What could she do?” Ranger answered. “Jug had been too slick for her.”

“So the story ends there.”

“No. After a while young Webb came back and raised a row. He was a wild young coot, I gather. Got off on the wrong foot and killed a fellow named Giles Lemmon, who was one of Jug’s men. They gave him twenty years in the penitentiary.”

“Which made it nice for Mr. Packard,” Sloan drawled. “Showing how all things work together for good to them that love the Lord.”

“How dreadful!” Sandra murmured. “For him and his poor mother, if she was still living.”

“She was then,” Ranger replied. “She isn’t now. Two years after he went to prison I read in the paper of her death.”

“And the son—he’s still in the penitentiary?”

“I reckon so, Sandra. Maybe he deserved what he got. When a man kills he can’t kick if he has to pay the price. But one thing is sure. Jug Packard brought about that killing. He was more to blame than the boy.”

“Men with as much money as Packard don’t go to prison,” Sloan said, a cynical bitterness in his face.

“Oh, I hope that isn’t true in this country,” Sandra cried.

“In the land of the free, where all men are born equal,” the ranch guest mocked.

“It isn’t true, Sandra,” the girl’s father said. “Though I’m afraid it is true that a rich man can often buy delays and even avoidance of punishment that a poor one can’t afford. In Packard’s case there was no evidence that he had committed a crime. I’ve said too much. I don’t know he slickered Mrs. Webb out of her mine. That’s only my private opinion.”

Sloan rose and said he thought he would be turning in for the night. Sandra was shocked at his face. His mouth was a thin tight slit and there was something wolfish in his tortured eyes.