Louisiana Lou. A Western Story

He reached Wilding’s office and found the man, a young fellow who appeared capable and alert. He also found, with a distinct shock, the girl who had occupied a niche in his memory for nineteen years. He found her with banged and docked hair, rouged and bepowdered, clad in georgette and glimmering artificial silk, tapping at a typewriter in Wilding’s office. He had seen Broadway swarming with replicas of her.

His business with Wilding took a little time. He explained that mademoiselle might have need of his legal services and certainly would wish to see Miss Pettis. The lawyer called the girl in and to her De Launay explained that mademoiselle was the daughter of her grandfather’s former employee and that she would wish to discuss with her certain matters connected with the death of French Pete. The girl swept De Launay with hard, disdainful eyes, and he knew that she was forming a concept of mademoiselle by comparison with his own general disreputableness.

“Oh, sure; I jus’ as soon drop in on this dame,” she said. “One o’ these Frog refygees, I s’pose. Well, believe me, she’s come a long way to get disappointed if she thinks I’m givin’ any hand-outs to granddad’s pensioners. I got troubles of my own.”

“We’ll be at the hotel, Miss Pettis and I,” said Wilding. “That will do, Miss Pettis.”

The girl teetered out on her spiky heels, with a sway of hips.

De Launay turned back to the lawyer. “I’ve a little personal business you might attend to,” he said. Wilding set himself to listen, resignedly, imagining that this bum would yield him nothing of profit.

In ten minutes he was staring at De Launay with amazement that was almost stupefaction, fingering documents as though he must awake from sleep and find he had been dreaming. De Launay talked on, his voice slightly thick, his eyes heavy, but his mind clear and capable.

Wilding went with him to a bank and, after their business there was finished, shook hands in parting with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval and awe.

De Launay, having finished the more pressing parts of his business, made straight for Johnny the Greek’s. The two burros still stood there, eyes closed and heads hanging. He walked around them before going in. A worn, dirty leather scabbard, bursting at the seams, slanted up past the withers of one brute, and out of its mouth projected the butt of a rifle. The plate was bright with wear, and the walnut of the stock was battered and dull with age.

De Launay scratched the chin of the burro, was rewarded by the lazy flopping of an ear and then went in to his delayed orgy.

He had received a shock, as he realized he would, and for the moment all thought of Solange and his responsibility to her had vanished. He had come back home after twenty years, seeking solace in the scenes he had known as a boy, seeking, with half-sentimental memory, a little girl with bright hair and sweet face. He had come to find a roaring, artificial city on the site of the range, the friends of his youth gone, the men he had known dying out, his very trade a vanishing art. Instead of a fairy maiden, sweet and demure, a grown-up child as he had vaguely pictured her, he had found a brazen, painted, slangy, gum-chewing flapper, a modern of moderns such as would have broken old Ike Brandon’s heart – as it doubtless had. The last of the old-timers were a bootlegging bartender and a half-crazy and wholly vicious prospector.

Writhing under the sting of futility and disappointment, even the rotten poison served by Johnny the Greek appealed to him. His old neurosis, almost forgotten in the half-tolerant, half-amused interest in Mademoiselle d’Albret’s adventure which had occupied his activities during the past weeks, revived with redoubled force. Sick, shaken, and disgusted, he strode through the pool room and, with deliberation masking his avid desire for forgetfulness, climbed the stairs to the hidden oasis presided over by his old enemy, Snake Murphy.

CHAPTER VIII

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

Mademoiselle was having a series of enlivening shocks. First came Wilding, with Miss Pettis. He was received by Solange in the mezzanine gallery of the hotel and she learned, for the first time, that De Launay was sending her a lawyer to transact her business for her. This made her angry, his assuming that she needed a lawyer, or, even if she did, that he could provide her with one. However, as she needed a divorce from her incubus, and Wilding practiced also in the Nevada courts, she thought better of her first impulse to haughtily dismiss him. As for Wilding, he began to conclude that he had gone crazy or else had encountered a set of escaped lunatics when he beheld Solange, slender and straightly tailored, but with hair hidden under a close-fitting little turban and face masked by a fold of netting.

Marian Pettis was another shock. The extraordinary De Launay, whom she had supposed lost in some gutter, and without whose aid she had been puzzled how to proceed on her quest, was evidently very much on the job. Here was a starting point, at least.

Although, behind her mask, her face registered disapproval of the girl, she welcomed her as cordially as possible. In her sweet, bell voice, she murmured an expression of concern for her grandfather and, when Marian bluntly said, “He’s dead,” she endeavored to convey her sorrow. To which Miss Pettis, staring at her with hard, bold eyes, as at some puzzling freak, made no reply, being engaged in uneasily wondering what “graft” the Frenchwoman was “on.” Marian disliked being reminded of her grandfather’s demise, having been largely responsible for it when she had run away with a plausible stranger who had assured her that she had only to present herself at Hollywood to become instantly famous as a moving-picture star, a promise that had sadly miscarried.

“But it was not so much of your grandfather as of my father that I wished to see you,” mademoiselle explained, ignoring Marian’s lack of response. “As for Monsieur Wilding, it is later I will require his services, though it may be that he can aid me not only in procuring a divorce from this husband, but in another matter also, Miss Pettis, and perhaps, Monsieur Wilding, you know how my father was murdered?”

Wilding shook his head but Marian nodded at once.

“Gee, yes!” she said. “I was a kid when he was croaked, but I remember it all right. There was a guy they called Louisiana, and he was one of those old-time gunmen, but at that he was some kid believe me! He took a shot at a fellow here in Sulphur Falls – that was before there was any town here at all – and they was givin’ him the gate outa the neighborhood. Going to lynch him if they caught him, I guess. I don’t remember much of it except how this guy looks, but I’ve heard the old man tell about it.

“He come ridin’ out to our place all dressed up like a movie cow-puncher and you’d never have dreamed there was a mob about three jumps behind him. He sets in with us and takes a great shine to me. I was quite a doll in those days they tell me.” She tossed her head as much as to say that she was still able to qualify for the description.

“Believe me, he was a regular swell, and you’d never in the world a thought he was what he turned out to be. Delaney, his name was, or something like that. Well, he plays with me and when he goes away I cried and wanted him to stay. I remember it just as vivid! He had on these chaps – leather pants, you know – and a Stetson slanting on his head, and a fancy silk neckerchief which he made into comical dolls and things. Oh! he sure made a hit with Marian!

“He swore he was comin’ back, like young Lochinvar, and marry me some day, and I was all tickled to think he would do it.

“Then, would you believe it, the murdering villain rides away about half an hour before the mob comes and goes south toward the mountains. Next day or so, we pick up your father, shot something terrible, and this awful ‘Louisiana’ Delaney had done it, in cold blood and just to be killing something.”

“Ah!” Mademoiselle stiffened and quivered. Her voice was like brass. “In cold blood, you say? Then he had no provocation? He was not an enemy of my father?”

“Naw. Your father didn’t have no enemies. So far as I know, this Louisiana didn’t even know him. He was a cattleman and they hated the sheepmen, you know, and used to fight them. Then, he was one of these gunmen, always shooting some one, and they used to be terrible. They’d kill some one just for the fun of it – to sort of keep in practice.”

Mademoiselle shuddered, envisioning some bloodthirsty, evil thing, unspeakably depraved. But it was momentary. She spoke again in her metallic voice.

“That is well to know. I will look for this Louisiana.”

“You ain’t likely to find him. He never was seen or heard of around here no more. I’ve heard granddad call him ‘the last of the gunmen,’ because the country was settling up and getting civilized then. One thing sure, he never made good on that Lochinvar sketch, I can promise you.”

“It is no matter. He will come back – or I will follow him. It is of another matter I would talk. There was something of a mine that my father had found.”

“I’ve heard of that,” said Wilding. “It’s quite a legend around here. The Lunch Rock mine, they call it, and Jim Banker, the prospector, looks for it every year.”

“But he ain’t found it – ”

A bell boy passed, singing out: “Call for Mad’mo’selle Dalbray! Call fer Mad’mo’selle Dalbray!” Mademoiselle rose and beckoned to him.

“Three men in the lobby wish to see yuh, miss!” the boy told her. “Said Mr. Delonny sent ’em.”

“Monsieur de Launay! What next? Well, show them up here.”

A few moments later Sucatash and Dave Mackay stalked on their high heels up the stairs and into the alcove of the mezzanine balcony, holding their broad hats in their hands. Sucatash gulped as mademoiselle’s slender figure confronted him, and Dave’s mouth fell open.

Behind them lurched another man, slinking in the background.

“What is it, messieurs?” asked Solange, her voice once more clear and sweet. The cow-punchers blushed in unison.

“This here Mr. Delonny done sent us here to see you, ma’am. He allows you-all wants a couple of hands for this trip you’re takin’ into the Esmeraldas. He likewise instigates us to corral this here horned toad, Banker, who’s a prospector, because he says you’ll want to see him about some mine or other, and, Banker, he don’t know nothing about nothing but lookin’ for mines: which he ain’t never found a whole lot, I reckon, none whatever.”

Solange smiled and her smile, even with veiled face, was something to put these bashful range riders at their ease. Both of them felt warmed to their hearts.

“I am very glad to see you,” she said. “It is true that I require help, and I shall be glad of yours. It is kind of you to enter my employ.”

Dave uttered a protest. “Don’t you mention it, mad’moiselle. Sucatash and me was both in France and, while we can’t give that there country any rank ahead of the U. S. A., we hands it to her frank, that any time we can do anything fer a mad’moiselle, we does it pronto! We’re yours, ma’am, hide, hair an’ hoofs!”

“Which we sure are,” agreed Sucatash, not to be outdone. “That’s whatever!”

“And here is this minin’ sharp,” said Dave, turning about and reaching for the shrinking Banker. “Come here, Jim, and say howdy, if you ain’t herded with burros so long you’ve forgotten human amenities that a way. Mad’mo’selle wants to talk to you.”

Banker emerged from behind them. He, too, held his hat in hand, an incredibly stained and battered felt atrocity. His seamed face was nut brown under constant exposure to the sun. His garments were faded nondescripts, and on his feet were thick-soled, high-lacing boots. He gave an impression of dry dinginess, like rawhide, and his eyes were mean and shifty. He might have been fifty or he might have been older; one could not tell.

Mademoiselle was uncertain. She hardly knew enough to question this queer specimen, and so she turned to Marian Pettis.

“Miss Pettis, can you explain to him? I can hardly tell him what we wish to know. And, if the mine is found, half of it will be yours, you know.”

“Mine! Lord sakes, I ain’t counting on it. You gotta fat chance to find it. This bird, here, has been searchin’ for it ever since the year one and he ain’t found it. Say, Banker, this is Mad’mo’selle Dalbray. She’s the daughter of that French Pete that was killed – ”

“Hey?” said Banker, sharply.

“Ah, you know the yarn. You been huntin’ his mine since Lord knows when. This lady is lookin’ for it and she wants some dope on how to go about findin’ it.”

“An she expects me to tell her?” cried Banker, in a falsetto whine. “Yuh reckon if I knowed where it was I wouldn’t have staked it long ago? I don’t know nothin’ about it.”

“Well, you know the Esmeraldas, old Stingin’ Lizard,” growled Sucatash. “You can tell her what to do about gettin’ there.”

“I can’t tell her nothin’ no more than you can,” said Banker. “She’s got Ike Brandon’s letters, ain’t she? He told her where it was, didn’t he? What’s she comin’ to me fer? I don’t know nothin’.”

“Were you here when my father was killed?” Solange asked, kindly. She felt sorry for the old fellow.

“Hey! What’s that? Was I here? No’m, I wasn’t here! I was – I reckon I was over south of the range, out on the desert. I don’t know nothin’ about the killin’.”

He was looking furtively at her veil, his eyes shifting away and back to it, awed by the mystery of the hidden eyes. He was like a wild, shy animal, uneasy in this place and among these people so foreign to his natural environment.

Solange sighed. “I am sorry, monsieur,” she said. “I had hoped you could tell me more.”

He broke in again with his whining voice. “It was this here Louisiana, every one says.”

“Louisiana! Yes – ” Solange’s tones became fierce and she leaned closer to the dry desert rat, who shrank from her. “And when I find him – when I find this man who shot my father like a dog – ”

Her voice was tense and almost shrill, cutting like steel.

“I shall kill him!”

The dim, veiled face was close to Banker’s. He raised his corded, lean hand to the corded, lean throat as though he was choking. He stared at her fixedly, his shifty eyes for once held steady. There was horror and fear in the back of them. He put one foot back, shifted his weight to it, put the other back, then the first again, slowly retreating backward, with his stricken eyes still on her. Then he suddenly whirled about and scuttled down the stairs as though the devil were after him.

Solange remained standing, puzzled.

“That is queer,” she said. “Why is he frightened? I did not mean to startle him. I suppose he is shy.”

“No. Just locoed, like all them prospectors,” said Sucatash. “Furthermore, he’s ornery, ma’am. Probably don’t like this talk of killin’. They say he beefed Panamint Charlie, his partner, some years ago and I reckon he’s a mite sensitive that a way.”

“He doesn’t seem to know where the mine is,” said Solange. “Nor do you, mademoiselle?”

“Me?” said Marian, airily. “If I knew where that mine was, believe me, you’d be late looking for it. I’d have been settled on it long ago.”

“I wish,” said Solange, “that I knew what to do. Perhaps, if this unspeakable De Launay were here – ”

“I can telephone the Greek’s and see if he’s there,” suggested MacKay. Solange assented and he hurried to a telephone.

“It ain’t likely he knows much that will help, mad’mo’selle,” said Sucatash, also eager to aid, “but my old man was around here when these hostilities was pulled off, and it’s possible he might help you. He could tell you as much as any one, I reckon.”

“Your father?”

“Yes, ma’am. I recommend that you get your outfit together, except fer hosses, hire a car to take it out and start from our ranch at Willow Spring. It’s right near the mountains and not far from Shoestring Cañon, which it’s likely you’ll have to go that way to get into the hills. And you’ll be able to get all the hosses you want right there.”

“That sounds as though it might be the wise thing to do,” said Wilding.

Solange turned to him. “That is true. I thank Monsieur Sucatash. And, Monsieur Wilding, there is one thing you can do for me, besides the arrangements for that divorce. Can you not search the records to find out what is known of my father’s death and who killed him?”

“But it appears that the killer was Louisiana.”

“Yes – but who is Louisiana? Where did he go? That is what I must find out. Oh! If this depraved De Launay were of any benefit, instead of being a sorrow and disgust to me – ”

At this moment Dave MacKay reappeared. Solange turned to him eagerly. “Did you find him, monsieur?”

“I sure did,” said Dave, with disgust. “Leastways, I located him. That animated vat of inebriation has done went and landed in jail.”

CHAPTER IX

BEHIND PRISON BARS

A somewhat intoxicated cow-puncher, in from the mountain ranges north of the town, intrigued De Launay when he returned to Johnny the Greek’s. To be exact, it was not the cow-puncher, who was merely a gawky, loud-mouthed and uncouth importation from a Middle Western farm, broken to ride after a fashion, to rope and brand when necessary and to wield pliers in mending barbed wire, the sort of product, in fact, that had disillusioned De Launay. It was his clothes that the ex-légionnaire admired.

They were clothes about like those worn by Sucatash and Dave Mackay. De Launay could have purchased such clothes at any one of a dozen shops, but they would have been new and conspicuous. The fellow wore a wide-brimmed hat, the wear of which had resulted in certain picturesque sags that De Launay considered extremely artistic. His boots were small and fairly new, and not over adorned with ornamentation. There was also a buckskin waistcoat which was aged and ripened. The other accessories were unimportant. Such things as spurs, bridle, and saddle De Launay had bought when he acquired a horse.

De Launay had imbibed enough of the terrible liquor served by Snake Murphy to completely submerge his everyday personality. He retained merely a fixed idea that he wished to return as far as possible in spirit to the days of nineteen years ago. To his befuddled mind, the first step was to dress the part. He was groping after his lost youth, unable to realize that it was, indeed, lost beyond recovery; that he was, in hardly a particular, the wild lad who had once ridden the desert ranges.

The more he drank, the firmer became the notion that, to him, instead of to this imitation of the real thing, rightfully belonged these insignia of a vanishing fraternity. He considered ways and means, rejecting one after another. He vaguely laid plans to wait until the fellow went to his quarters for the night, and then break in and steal his clothes. A better plan suggested itself; to ply him with drink until unconscious and then drag him somewhere and strip him. This also did not seem practical. Then he thought of inducing him to gamble and winning all his possessions, but a remnant of sense deterred him. De Launay, though he gambled recklessly, never, by any chance, won. In fact, his losings were so monotonous that the diversion had ceased to be exciting and he had abandoned it.

Finally, having reached a stage where the effort to think was too much for him, he did the obvious thing and offered to buy the fellow’s clothes. The cow-puncher was almost as drunk as De Launay and showed it much more. He was also belligerent, which De Launay never was. Furthermore, he had reached the stage where he was suspicious of anything out of the ordinary. He thought De Launay was ridiculing him.

“Sell you my clo’es! Say, feller, what you givin’ me?”

A bullet-headed, crop-haired, and lowering laborer, who was leaning against the bar, uttered a snorting laugh.

“Lamp de guys wit’ de French heels an’ de one wit’ de sissy eyebrow on ’is lip, would youse? Dey’s a coupla heroes wat’s been to France; dey gets dem habits dere.”

The sensitive cow hand glared about him, but the leering toughs who echoed their spokesman’s laughter were not safe to challenge. There were too many of them. De Launay stood alone and, to him as to the others, that little pointed mustache was a mark of affectation and effeminacy.

“You better pull yer freight before I take a wallop at yuh,” he remarked, loudly.

“Tell ’im to go git a shave, bo,” suggested the bullet-headed man.

“I’ll singe the eyebrow offa him myself if he don’t git outa here,” growled the cow hand, turning back to his liquor.

De Launay went back to his table and sat down. He brooded on his failure, and to him it seemed that he must have that hat, that waistcoat and those boots at any cost. The others in the room snickered and jeered as they eyed his sagging figure and closed eyes.

He finally got up and lurched out of the room. The door opened on a narrow stairway leading down to a sort of pantry behind the main billiard parlor on the ground floor. The stairway was steep and dark, and the landing was small and only dimly lighted by a dusty, cobwebbed square of window high up in the outer wall.

De Launay sat on the top step and resumed his brooding, his head sunk on his arms, which were folded on his knees. He felt a deep sense of injury, and his sorrow for himself was acute. He was only half conscious of his sufferings, but they were dully insistent, above the deadening influence of the liquor. There were some things he wanted and they continually ran through his mind in jumbled sequence. There was a pair of high heels, then there was a sort of vision of limitless, abandoned plain covered with yellowing grass and black sage clumps, and surmounted with a brilliant blue sky. Following this was a confused picture of a blackened, greasy waistcoat from which a dark, fathomless pair of eyes looked out. He wondered how a waistcoat could have a pair of eyes, and why the eyes should hold in them lights like those that flashed from a diamond.

Men came up the stairs and crowded roughly past him. He paid them no heed. Occasionally other men left the hidden barroom and went down. These were rougher. One of them even kicked him in passing. He merely looked up, dully took in the figure and sank his head again on his arms. Inside, newcomers advised Snake Murphy to go out and throw the bum into the street. As this might have led to inquiries, Snake decided to leave well enough alone until dark.

Finally the cow-puncher, well loaded with more liquor than he could comfortably carry, decided to take an uncertain departure. He waved a debonair and inclusive farewell to all those about him, teetered a bit on his high heels, straddled an imaginary horse, and, with legs well apart and body balanced precariously, tacked, by and full, for the door.

Reaching it, he leaned against it, felt for the knob, turned it, carefully backed away from the door and opened it. Holding the edge, he eased himself around it and, balancing on the outer side, closed it again with elaborate care. Then he took a tentative step and lifted his hand from its support.

The next moment he tripped over De Launay and fell over his head, turning a complete flip.

De Launay came out of his trance with a start to find a hundred and seventy pounds of cow-puncher sprawling in his lap and clinging about his neck. His dull eyes, gummy with sleep, showed him a hat of sorts, a greasy waistcoat —

Calmly he took the cowboy by the neck and raised him. The fellow uttered a cry that was choked. De Launay pulled off his hat and substituted his own on the rumpled locks of the young man. He then swung him about as though he were a child, laid him over his knees and stripped from him his waistcoat.

His own coat was tossed aside while he wriggled into the ancient garment. He held the cowboy during this process by throwing one leg over him, around his neck, and clamping his legs together. The cowboy uttered muffled yells of protest.

He hauled the fellow’s boots off without much trouble, but when it came to removing his own shoes there was a difficulty which he finally adjusted by rising, grasping the man by the neck again – incidentally shutting off his cries – and depositing him on the top step, after which he sat upon him.

It took only a second to rip the laces from his shoes and kick them off. Then he started to pull on the boots. But the noise had finally aroused those inside and they came charging out.