Louisiana Lou. A Western Story

The men had reached the road and were lined up across it. One of them had a shotgun and others were armed with forks and rakes. They waved their weapons and shouted for him to stop. He calmly drew the pistol and pulled his horse down in the midst of them.

“Well?” he asked as they surged around him. The man with the shotgun suddenly saw the pistol and started to throw the gun to his shoulder.

“We got him!” he yelled, excitedly.

“Got who?” asked De Launay. “You pointing that gun at me? Better head it another way.”

His automatic was swinging carelessly at the belligerent farmer. The man was not long in that country, but he was long enough to know the difference between a shotgun and an automatic forty-five. He lost his nerve.

“We’re lookin’ for an escaped convict,” he muttered. “Be you the feller?”

“Keep on looking,” said De Launay, pleasantly. “But drop that gun and those pitchforks. What do you mean by holding up a peaceable man on the highroads?”

The rattled farmer and his cohorts were bluffed and puzzled. The automatic spoke in terms too imperative to be disregarded. Capturing escaped prisoners was all very well, but when it involved risks such as this they preferred more peaceful pursuits. The men backed away, the farmer let the shotgun drop to the ground.

“Pull your freight!” said De Launay, shortly. They obeyed.

He whirled his horse and resumed his headlong flight. He had gained fifty yards when the farmer, who had run back to his gun, fired it after him. The shot scattered too much to cause him any uneasiness. He laughed back at them and fled away.

Other places had been warned also, but De Launay rushed past them without mishap. The automatic was a passport which these citizens were eager to honor, and which the police had not taken into account. To stop an unarmed fugitive was one thing, but to interfere with one who bristled with murder was quite another.

A new peril was on his trail, however. He soon heard the distant throb of a motor running with the muffler open. Looking back along the road, he could see the car as it rounded curves on top of the ridge. All too soon it was throbbing behind him and not half a mile away.

But he did not worry. Right ahead was a stone marker which he knew marked the boundary of Nevada. Long before the car could reach him he had passed it. He kept on for two or three hundred yards at the same pace while the car, forging up on him, was noisy with shouts and commands to stop. He slowed down to a trot and grinned at the men who stood in the car and pointed their revolvers at him. His pistol was dangling in his hand.

“You gents want me?” he asked, pleasantly. His former captor sputtered an oath.

“You’re shoutin’ we want you,” he cried. “Get off that horse and climb in here, you – ”

De Launay’s voice grew hard and incisive.

“You got a warrant for my arrest?”

“Warrant be hanged! You’re an escaped prisoner! Climb down before we let you have it!”

“That’s interesting. Where’s your extradition papers?”

The officer shrieked his commands and imprecations, waving his pistol. De Launay grinned.

“If you want to test the law, go ahead,” he said. “I’m in Nevada as you know very well. If you want to shoot, you may get me – but I can promise that I’ll get you, too. The first man of you that tightens a trigger will get his. Go to it!”

An officer who is on the right side of the law is thereby fortified and may proceed with confidence. If he is killed, his killer commits murder. But an officer who is on the wrong side of the law has no such psychological reënforcement. He is decidedly at a disadvantage. The policemen were courageous – but they faced a dilemma. If they shot De Launay, they would have to explain. If he shot them, it would be in self-defense and lawful resistance to an illegal arrest. Furthermore, there was something about the way he acted that convinced them of his intention and ability. There were only three of them, and he seemed quite confident that he could get them all before they could kill him.

The officer who had been his guardian thought of a way out.

“There’s a justice of the peace a mile ahead,” he said. “We’ll just linger with you until we reach him and get a warrant.”

“Suit yourselves,” said De Launay, indifferently. “But don’t crowd me too closely. Those things make my horse nervous.”

They started the car, but he galloped easily on ahead, turning in his saddle to watch them. They proceeded slowly, allowing him to gain about forty yards. The officer thought of shooting at him when he was not looking, but desisted when he discovered that De Launay seemed to be always looking.

They had proceeded only a short distance when De Launay, without warning, spurred his horse into a run, swinging him at the same time from side to side of the road. Turned in his saddle, he raised his hand and the staccato rattle of his automatic sounded like the roll of a drum. The startled officers fired and missed his elusive form. They had their aim disarranged by the sudden jolt and stoppage of the car. De Launay had shot the two front tires and a rear one to pieces.

The discomfited policemen saw him disappearing down the road in a cloud of dust from which echoed his mocking laugh and a chanted, jubilant verse that had not been heard in that region for nineteen years:

“My Louisiana! Louisiana Lou!”

CHAPTER XI

JIM BANKER HITS THE TRAIL

When Jim Banker, the prospector, hurried from the hotel, he was singularly agitated for a man merely suffering from the shyness of the desert wanderer in the presence of a pretty woman. His furtive looks and the uneasy glances he cast behind him, no less than the panicky character of his flight, might have aroused further question on the part of those he left, had they been in a position to observe the man.

He made no pause until he had gained the comparative seclusion of Johnny the Greek’s place, which he found almost deserted after the riot of which De Launay had been the center. Johnny had succeeded in getting rid of the officers without the discovery of his illicit operations, and Snake Murphy was once more in his place ready to dispense hospitality. Few remained to accept it, however, the imminent memory of the police having frightened all others away. A liberal dispensation of money and the discovery that De Launay’s coat and shoes were of excellent make and more valuable than those he had lost, had secured the silence of the man whom De Launay had robbed, and he had departed some time since.

Banker sidled into the upstairs room and made his way to the end of the bar, where he called huskily for whisky. Having gulped a couple of fiery drinks, he shivered and straightened up, his evil eyes losing their look of fright.

“Say, Murph,” he whispered, hoarsely. “They’s the devil to pay!”

“How come?” asked Murphy, yawning.

“You remember French Pete, who was killed back in nineteen hundred?”

“The Basco? Sure I do. I got a reminder, hain’t I? Louisiana done shot me up before he went out an’ beefed Pete – if he did beef him.”

“If he did? Whatever makes you say that? If he didn’t– who did?” Jim blurted out the question in a gasp, as though fairly forcing utterance of the words. Murphy flicked a sidelong look at him and then bent his absent gaze across the room.

“Oh – I dunno. Never knew Louisiana to use a rifle, though. The dare-devil! I can hear him now, ridin’ off a-laughin’ and a-chortlin’

“Back to Whisky Chitto; to Beau Regarde bayou;To my Louisiana – Louisiana Lou.

“Remember the feller’s singin’, Jim?”

The few men in the place had turned startled eyes as Murphy whined the doggerel ballad nasally. It was strange to them, but Banker shivered and shrank from the grinning bartender.

“Stop it, yuh darn fool! yuh gi’ me the creeps! W’at’s the matter with everything to-day? Everywhere I go some one starts gabblin’ about mines and French Pete an’ this all-fired – Louisiana! It’s a damn good thing there ain’t any more like him around here.”

“W’at’s that about mines – an’ French Pete? Yuh was the one that mentioned him.”

Banker leaned confidentially nearer. “Snake, d’yuh think old Ike Brandon didn’t know where the mine was?”

Snake regarded him contemptuously. “Yuh reckon Ike would have lived and died pore as a heifer after a hard winter if he’d a knowed? You’re loco, Jim: plumb, starin’, ravin’ loco!”

But Jim only leaned closer and dropped his voice until it was almost inaudible.

“Maybe so. But did you or any one else ever know what language them Bascos talks?”

“French, I reckon,” said Snake, indifferently.

“French, no, sir! Charlie Grandjean, that used to ride fer Perkins & Company was French and he told me once that they didn’t talk no French nor nothin’ like it. They talks their own lingo and there ain’t nobody but a Basco that knows this Basco talk.”

“Well,” said Snake, easily. “What’s the answer? I’ll bite.”

“French Pete’s gal has lit in here all spraddled out an’ lookin’ fer French Pete’s mine,” croaked Banker, impressively. Snake was owlishly dense.

“His gal? Never knew he had a gal.”

“He had one, a plenty: sort of a gashly critter like a witch, with teeth all same like a lobo. Kind ’at’d stick a knife in yuh quick as look at yuh.”

“I reckon I won’t go sparkin’ her none, then. Well, how’s this here Basco lady with the enchantin’ ways allow she’s goin’ to find Pete’s mine?”

“That’s what I’m askin’ yuh? How’s she goin’ to find it? Yuh reckon she comes pirootin’ out here all the way from Basco regions just on the hunch that she can shut her eyes an’ walk to it?”

“Maybe – if she’s full o’ witchcraft. I reckon she stands as good a chance that a way as any one does. Drink up and ferget it, Jim.”

“I been a-thinkin’, Snake. Brandon didn’t know where it was. But maybe Pete leaves a writin’, say, which he tells Ike to send to his folks. It’s in Basco, see, and Ike can’t read it nor nobody else, so they sends it to this Basco place and the gal gits it. If that ain’t right why ever does this Basco lady come a-runnin’ out here?”

“If it is right, why does she delay all these years?” asked Snake, pertinently.

“Which yuh ain’t seen her, Snake. I makes a guess this gal ain’t more’n risin’ two or three years when she gets that Basco note. She has to grow up, and when she gets big enough the war done come along and keeps her holed up until now. Yuh can gamble she knows where that mine was.”

Snake pondered this theory thoughtfully. “Yuh may be right at that,” he admitted, an expression of wonder passing over his features. “But yuh been to see her? What she say about it?”

“Huh! She was askin’ me if I knowed where it was. But that was just a blind to put me off’n the track – an’ she probably wanted to make sure no one else had found it. She was quizzin’ that Pettis girl, too, makin’ sure Ike hadn’t told her nothin’.”

“Yuh may be right,” admitted Snake again. “God-dlemighty! Yuh reckon she’ll find it?”

Jim leered evilly at him. “No, I don’t reckon she will. But she might help me find it.”

“Howzzat?” Snake was startled.

“I gotta have a grubstake, Snake. How about it?”

“Jest outline this here project, Jim. Let me git the slant on it.”

The two heads, one slick and black, though with streaks of gray, the other shaggy, colorless, and unkempt, came together and a growl of hoarse and carefully guarded whispers murmured at that end of the bar. After ten minutes’ talk, Snake went to the safe and returned with a roll of bills and a piece of paper, pen, and ink. He laboriously made out a document, which Banker as laboriously signed. Then Snake surrendered the money and the two rascals shook hands.

Banker at once became all furtive activity. For a few hours he slunk from store to store, buying necessaries for his trip. By nighttime he was ready, and before the moon had risen in the cold November sky he was hazing his burros southward toward the Nevada line.

Although he was mounted on a fairly good horse, his progress was necessarily slow, as he had to accommodate his pace to that of the sedate burros. He was in no hurry, however. With true, desert-born patience, he plodded along, making camp that night about ten miles from Sulphur Falls. The following day he resumed his snaillike pace, crawling out of the fertile valley to the grasslands beyond, and so on and on until the night found him in the salt pan and the alkali. He passed the Brandon ranch at Three Creek, long since sold and now occupied by a couple of Basques who had built up from sheep-herding for wages until they now owned and ran a fair flock of sheep. Here he did not stop, hazing his burros past as though he had suddenly acquired a reason for haste. When Twin Forks was a couple of miles to the rear he reverted to his former sluggish pace.

The next day was a repetition. He plodded on stolidly, making without hesitation for some spot which was ahead of him. Finally, that evening, he made camp about three miles north of Wallace’s Lazy Y Ranch, near Willow Spring, and not very far from the gap in the wall of the Esmeraldas which marked the entrance to Shoestring Creek and Cañon.

The next morning he did not break camp, but lolled around all day until about three o’clock in the afternoon. At that time his acute ears caught the murmur of a motor long before the car came in sight in the rolling ground.

When it passed he was sitting stolidly by his camp fire, apparently oblivious to his surroundings. He did not seem to look up or notice the car, but, in reality, not a detail of it escaped him. He saw the occupants turn and look at him and heard their comments, though the words escaped him.

He muttered an imprecation, strangely full of hate and, in the manner of lonely desert rats, grumbled in conversation with himself.

“I gotta do it. She never come all this way without he told her somethin’. Fer all I know he might ha’ seen more’n I thought. An’ she’d do what she said, quicker’n look at yuh. She ain’t right, nohow. Why don’t she show her face? An’ Charlie Grandjean says them Basques is uncanny, that a way. She knows! There ain’t no gettin’ around it. Even if he never told her, she knows!”

The car had passed and he now openly looked after it, mouthing and muttering. He had observed the driver, a hired chauffeur from the town, and he deduced that the car was going back. Indeed, there was no road by which it could have gone into the mountains at this point. He saw that young Wallace, nicknamed Sucatash from the color of his hair, and Dave MacKay, another of the Lazy Y riders, were in the car with their saddles, and that the veiled Basque girl was seated with them, while her luggage was piled high between the seats.

“Goin’ to git hosses and outfit at Wallace’s and go in from there. Course, they’ll have to go into Shoestring. It’s the only way. They’ll stop at Wallace’s and it’ll take a day to git the cavvy up and ready. They’ll be movin’ day after to-morrow ’nless they want to git caught in the snow. Proves she knows right where to go or she wouldn’t head in there this time o’ year.”

He gloomed some more.

“That girl ain’t right. She’s one o’ these here hypnotis’, er a medium, er some kind o’ witch. But she ain’t goin’ to git away with it. She ain’t goin’ to git the best of old Jim Banker after nineteen years. She ain’t goin’ to git her knife into Jim. No more’n old Panamint did. I fixed him– an’ I’ll fix her, too. Old Betsy’s still good fer a couple a’ hunderd yards, I reckon. I’ll let her lead me to it – er maybe I’ll git a chance to ketch her alone.”

This thought gave him pleasure for a while and he mumbled over it for an hour or two. Then he ate his evening meal and went to sleep. In his sleep he moaned a good deal and tossed about, dreaming of mysterious, ghostlike, veiled figures which threatened him and mocked him.

The next day he remained where he was. About noon he was puzzled at the sight of another motor car northward bound. He recognized in the driver the lawyer who had been present when he had been interviewed by the French girl, but he did not know what brought him there. Manifestly, he was on the way back to Sulphur Falls, and Banker finally concluded that he had been to Maryville, the county seat south of the Esmeraldas, on some legal business. In this he was right, though he could not guess what the business was nor how it favored his own designs.

On the following day he resumed his march. Now he followed the trail of the motor car which had brought Solange until he came opposite Wallace’s ranch. From here he took up another trail, that of a considerable train of pack horses and three saddle animals. It led straight to the steep gully in the rim of the Esmeraldas, where Shoestring Creek cut its way to the plain.

He noted, but hardly considered, an older trail that underlay this one. It was of a rider and two pack animals who had passed a day or two before.

CHAPTER XII

A REMINDER OF OLD TIMES

Much cheered and encouraged by his late adventures with the forces of law and order, De Launay fared onward to the south where the dim line of the Esmeraldas lay like a cloud on the horizon. He was half conscious of relief, as though something that had been hanging over his head in threat had been proved nonexistent. He did not know what it was and was content for the time being to bask in a sort of animal comfort and exhilaration arising out of his escape into the far-stretching range lands. Here were no fences, no farms, no gingerbread houses sheltering aliens more acquainted with automobiles than with horses. He had passed the last of them, without interruption even from the justice of the peace who lived along the road. As a matter of fact, De Launay had left the road as soon as the fences permitted and had taken to the trackless sage.

Even after nineteen years or more his knowledge and instinct held good. Unerringly he seized upon landmarks and pushed his way over unmarked trails that he recalled from his youth. Before the sun set that evening he had ridden up to the long-remembered ranch at Twin Forks and swung from his saddle, heedless of two or three fierce mongrel sheep dogs that leaped and howled about him.

The door that opened on the little porch, once hung with vines, but now bare and gray, opened and a stolid, dark foreigner appeared. He answered De Launay’s hail in broken English, but the légionnaire’s quick ear recognized the accent and he dropped into French. The man at once beamed a welcome, although the French he answered in was almost as bad as his English.

He and his brother, he told De Launay, while assisting him to put up his horse, were two Basques who had come out here fifteen years ago and had worked as herders until they had been able to save enough to go into business for themselves. They had gradually built up until, when Ike Brandon had died, they were in a position to buy his ranch. All of this was interesting to the soldier.

The first flush of his plunge into old scenes had faded out, and he was feeling a little lonely and depressed, missing, queerly enough, his occasional contact with mademoiselle. It came over him, suddenly, as he chattered with the Basque, in the kindly French tongue that was more familiar to him than his native English, that the vague dread that had been lifted had had to do with what he might expect at Brandon’s ranch. That dread had vanished when he had encountered Miss Pettis. That was queer, too, for his recent debauch had been the product of sharp disappointment at finding her, as well as the country, so changed from what he had expected. Then why should he now feel as though a load were lifted from his mind since he had seen her and found her utterly wanting in any trait that he regarded as admirable? He did not know, and for the time being he did not pause to inquire. With the directness born of long training in arms, he had a mission to pursue and he gave his thought to that.

The obvious thing was to question the Basque as to long-ago events. But here he drew blank. Neither this man nor his brother knew anything but vague hearsay, half forgotten. They had, it is true, known the story of Pierre d’Albret and his murder, and had looked for his mine as others had, but they had never found it and were inclined to doubt that it had ever existed.

“Monsieur,” said the hospitable Basque, as he set an incomprehensible stew of vegetables and mutton on the table before the hungry De Launay, “these stories have many endings after so many years. It was long after D’Albret was killed that we came into this country. It was spoken of at the time as a great mystery by some, and by others it was regarded as a settled affair. One side would have it that a man who was a desperado and a murderer had done it, while others said that it would never be known who had shot him. There is only this that I know. A man named Banker, who spends all his time searching for gold, has spent year after year in searching the Esmeraldas for D’Albret’s mine and, although he has never found it, he still wanders in the hills as though he believed that it would be found at last. Now, why should this Banker be so persistent when others have abandoned the search long ago?”

“I suppose because it is his business, as much as he has any, to search for gold wherever there is prospect of finding it,” said De Launay, carelessly.

“That may be so,” said the Basque, doubtfully, “As for me, I do not believe that the mine was in the Esmeraldas at all. I have looked, as others have, and have never seen any place where D’Albret might have dug. I have been through Shoestring Cañon many times and have seen every foot of its surface. If D’Albret came through the cañon, as he must have done, he must have left some sign of his digging. Yet who has ever found such indications?”

“Perhaps he covered it up?”

“Perhaps! I do not know. The man, Banker, searches, not only in the cañon but also throughout the range. And as he searches, he mutters to himself. He is a very strange man.”

“Most prospectors, especially the old ones, are strange. The loneliness goes to their heads.”

“That is true, monsieur, and it is the case with herders, as we have known. But Banker is more than queer. Once, when we were with our flocks in the Esmeraldas, we observed, one evening, a fire at some distance. My brother went over to see who it was and to invite him to share our camp if he were friendly. He came upon the man, Banker, crouched over his fire and talking to himself. He seemed to be listening to something, and he muttered strange words which my brother could not understand. Yet my brother understood one phrase which the man repeated many times. It was, as he told me, something like ‘I will find it. I will find it. I will find the gold.’ But he also spoke of everybody dying, and my brother was uneasy, seeing his rifle lying close at hand. He endeavored to move away, but made some noise and the man heard him. He sprang to his feet with a cry of fear and shot with his rifle in the direction of my brother. Fortunately he did not hit him and my brother fled away. In the morning we found that Banker had departed in great haste during the night as though he feared some attack.”

“H’m,” said De Launay, “that’s rather strange. But these old desert rats get strange attacks of nerves. They become very distrustful of all human beings. He was frightened.”

“He may have been – indeed – he was. Nevertheless, the man Banker is a violent man and very evil. When he is about, we go carefully, my brother and I. If Pierre d’Albret was shot for no reason, what is to prevent us, who are also Basques, from being treated in the same way?”

“By Banker? Nonsense!”

“Nonsense it may be, monsieur. Yet I do not know why it may not have been some one like Banker who shot D’Albret. But I talk too much to you because you are French.”

He became reticent after that, and De Launay, who, whatever he may have thought of the man’s opinions, did not intend to make a confidant of him, allowed the subject to drop. He slept there that night, feeling reasonably safe from pursuit, and in the morning went on his way.

But again, as he rode steadily across the alkali and sage, the lightness of heart that had long been unfamiliar, came back to him. He found himself looking back at his vague sentiment for the little girl of the years gone by and the strange notion that he must come back to her as he had so lightly promised. He had had that notion in the full belief that she must have developed as she had bade fair to do. It had been a shock to find her as she was, but, after the shock, here was that incomprehensible feeling of relief. He had not wanted to find her, after all!