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Treasure and Trouble Therewith

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TREASURE _and_ TROUBLE THEREWITH

_A TALE OF CALIFORNIA_

BY GERALDINE BONNER

1917




I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

JOHN BONNER

WHO, HIMSELF A WRITER, TRAINED ME IN THE WORK HE LOVED. WHAT MERIT THE
READER MAY FIND IN THESE PAGES IS THE RESULT OF THAT TRAINING, UNDERTAKEN
WITH A FATHER'S PRIDE, CARRIED ON WITH A FATHER'S BELIEF AND
ENCOURAGEMENT.

GERALDINE BONNER




CONTENTS

I. HANDS UP

II. THE TULES

III. MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE

IV. THE DERELICT

V. THE MARKED PARAGRAPH

VI. PANCHA

VII. THE PICAROON

VIII. THOSE GIRLS OF GEORGE'S

IX. GREEK MEETS GREEK

X. MICHAELS THE MINER

XI. THE SOLID GOLD NUGGET

XII. A KISS

XIII. FOOLS IN THEIR FOLLY

XIV. THE NIGHT RIDER

XV. THE LAST DINNER

XVI. THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

XVII. THE WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

XVIII. OUTLAWED

XIX. HALF TRUTHS AND INFERENCES

XX. MARK PAYS A CALL

XXI. A WOMAN SCORNED

XXII. THEREBY HANGS A TALE

XXIII. THE CHINESE CHAIN

XXIV. LOVERS AND LADIES

XXV. WHAT JIM SAW

XXVI. PANCHA WRITES A LETTER

XXVII. BAD NEWS

XXVIII. CHRYSTIE SEES THE DAWN

XXIX. LORRY SEES THE DAWN

XXX. MARK SEES THE DAWN

XXXI. REVELATION

XXXII. THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT

XXXIII. THE MORNING THAT CAME

XXXIV. LOST

XXXV. THE UNKNOWN WOMAN

XXXVI. THE SEARCH

XXXVII. HAIL AND FAREWELL




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

He ... heard the feller at the wheel say, "Hands up!" _Frontispiece_

"Oh, silly, unbelieving child!" came his voice

As it came it sent up a hoarse cry for food

The ghost of a smile touched her lips




TREASURE _and_ TROUBLE THEREWITH




CHAPTER I

HANDS UP


The time was late August some eleven years ago. The place that part of
central California where, on one side, the plain unrolls in golden
levels, and on the other swells upward toward the rounded undulations of
the foothills.

It was very hot; the sky a fathomless blue vault, the land dreaming in
the afternoon glare, its brightness blurred here and there by shimmering
heat veils. Checkered by green and yellow patches, dotted with the black
domes of oaks, it brooded sleepily, showing few signs of life. At long
intervals ranch houses rose above embowering foliage, a green core in the
midst of fields where the brown earth was striped with lines of fruit
trees or hidden under carpets of alfalfa. To the west the foothills rose
in indolent curves, tan-colored, as if clothed with a leathern hide.
Their hollows were filled with the darkness of trees huddled about hidden
streams, ribbons of verdure that wound from the mountains to the plain.
Farther still, vision faint, remote and immaculate, the white peaks of
the Sierra hung, a painting on the drop curtain of the sky.

Across the landscape a parent stem of road wound, branches breaking from
it and meandering thread-small to ranch and village. It was white-dusted
here, but later would turn red and crawl upward under the resinous
dimness of pine woods to where the mining camps clung on the lower wall
of the Sierra. Already it had left behind the region of farms in
neighborly proximity and the little towns that were threaded along it
like beads upon a string. Watching its eastward course, one would have
noticed that after it crested the first rise it ran free of habitation
for miles.

Along its empty length a dust cloud moved, a tarnishing spot on the
afternoon's hard brightness. This spot was the one point of energy in the
universal torpor. From it came the rhythmic beat of flying hoofs and the
jingle of harness. It was the Rocky Bar stage, up from Shilo through
Plymouth, across the Mother Lode and then in a steep, straining grade on
to Antelope and Rocky Bar, camps nestling in the mountain gorges. It was
making time now against the slow climb later, the four horses racing, the
reins loose on their backs.

There was only one passenger; the others had been dropped at towns along
the route. He sat on the front seat beside Jim Bailey the driver, his
feet on a pine box and a rifle across his knees. He and Jim Bailey knew
each other well, for he had often come that way, always with his box and
his rifle. He was Wells Fargo's messenger and his name was Danny Leonard.
In the box at his feet were twelve thousand dollars in coin to be
delivered that night to the Greenhide Mine at Antelope.

With nothing of interest in sight, talk between them was desultory. Jim
Bailey thought they'd take on some men at Plymouth when they stopped
there to victual up. The messenger, squinting at the swimming yellow
distance, yawned and said it might be a good thing, nobody knew when
Knapp and Garland would get busy again. They'd failed in the holdup of
the Rockville stage last spring and it was about time to hear from
them--the road after you passed Plymouth was pretty lonesome. Jim Bailey
snorted contemptuously and spat over the wheel--he guessed Knapp and
Garland weren't liable to bother _him_.

After this the conversation dropped. The stifling heat, the whirling dust
clouds broken by whiffs of air, dry as from a kiln and impregnated with
the pungent scent of the tarweed, made the men drowsy. Jim Bailey nodded,
the reins drawing slack between his fingers. Leonard slipped the rifle
from his knees to the floor and relaxed against the back of the seat.
Through half-shut lids he watched the whitened crests of the Sierra
brushed on the turquoise sky.

The horses clattered down a gulley and galloped across a wooden bridge
that spanned a dead watercourse. The ascent was steep and they took it
at a rush, backs humped, necks stretched, hoofs clattering among
loosened stones.

A sudden breeze carried their dust ahead, and for a moment the prospect
was obscured, the trees that filled the gulley, bunched at the summit
into a thicket, just discernible in foggy outline. The horses had gained
the level, Jim Bailey, who knew the road in his sleep, had cheered them
with a familiar chirrup, when the leaders stopped, recoiling in a clatter
of slackened harness on the wheelers. The stage came to a halt so violent
that Jim Bailey lurched forward against the splashboard, the reins jerked
out of his hands. He did not know what had happened, could see nothing
but the horses' backs, jammed together, lines and traces slapping about
their flanks.

Afterward, describing it at Mormons Landing, he laid it all to the dust.
In that first moment of surprise he hadn't made out the men, and anyway
who'd have expected it--on the open road in the full of the afternoon?
You couldn't put any blame on him, sprawled on his knees, the whole thing
coming so quick. When he picked himself up he looked into the muzzle of a
revolver and saw behind it a head, only the eyes showing between the hat
brim and a gunny sack tied round the lower part of the face.

After that it all went so swift you couldn't hardly tell. He didn't even
then know there were two of them--heard the feller at the wheel say,
"Hands up," and thought that was all there was to it--when the one at the
horses' heads fired. Leonard had given an oath and reached for his gun,
and right with that the report came, and Leonard heaved up with a sort of
grunt, and then settled and was still. The other feller came along down
through the dust, and Jim Bailey, paralyzed, with his hands up, knew
Knapp and Garland had got him at last.

The one at the wheel kept him covered while the other pulled out the box.
He could see him plain, all but his face, a big powerful chap, shoulders
on him like a prize fighter's, and freckled hands covered with red hair.
He got the box out with a jerk and dropped it, and then, snatching up a
stick, struck the near wheeler a blow on the flank and jumped back into
the bushes.

The horses started, mad, like they were locoed; it was a wonder the stage
wasn't upset, racing this way and that, up the bank and down on the other
side. Jim Bailey crawled out on the axle, picked up the dragging reins
and got back just in time to keep Leonard from bouncing out. He heaved
him up and held him round the body, and when he got the horses going
straight, took a look at him. That first time he thought he was dead,
white as chalk and with his eyes turned up. But after a spell of going he
decided there was life in him yet, and holding him with one arm,
stretched the other over the splashboard, shaking the reins on the
wheelers' backs, and the way those horses buckled to their work was worth
gettin' held up to see.

Half an hour later the Rocky Bar stage came like a cyclone into Mormons
Landing, Jim Bailey hopping like a grasshopper on the front seat, and on
his arm Danny Leonard, shot through the lung. They drew up in front of
the Damfino Saloon, and Mormons Landing, dead among its deserted ditches,
knew again a crowded hour of glorious life. Everybody came running and
lined up along the sidewalk, later to line up along the Damfino Bar. The
widow woman who ran the eating house put Danny Leonard in her own bed and
sent one of her sons, aged six, to San Marco for a doctor, and the other,
aged eight, to Jackson for the sheriff.

Before night fell the news had flashed through the countryside. On ranch
piazza and in cabin doorway, in the camps along the Mother Lode and the
villages of the plain, men were telling one another how Knapp and
Garland had held up the Rocky Bar stage and got away with twelve
thousand dollars in gold.




CHAPTER II

THE TULES


The place of the holdup was on the first upward roll of the hills.
Farther back, along more distant slopes, the chaparral spread like a dark
cloth but here there was little verdure. The rainless California summer
had scorched the country; mounded summit swelled beyond mounded summit
all dried to a uniform ochre. But if you had stood on the rise where the
stage stopped and faced toward the west, you would have seen, stretching
to the horizon, a green expanse that told of water.

This was the tules, a vast spread of marsh covered with bulrushes, flat
as a floor, and extending from a distant arm of the bay back into the
land. It was like a wedge of green thrust through the yellow, splitting
it apart, at one end meeting the sky in a level line, at the other
narrowing to a point which penetrated the bases of the hills. From these
streams wound down ravine and rift till their currents slipped into the
brackish waters of the marsh. Such a stream, dried now to a few stagnant
pools, had worn a way along the gulley where the holdup had occurred.

Down this gulley, the box between them, the bandits ran. Alders and bay
grew thick, sun spots glancing through their leaves, boughs slapping and
slashing back from the passage of the rushing bodies, stones rolling
under the flying feet. The heat was suffocating, the narrow cleft holding
it, the matted foliage keeping out all air. The men's faces were
empurpled, the gunny sacks about their necks were soaked with sweat. They
spoke little--a grunt, a muttered oath as a stone turned. Doubled under
the branches, crashing through a covert with closed eyes and warding arm,
they fled, now and then pausing for a quick change of hands on the box or
the sweep of a sleeve across a dripping brow. Nearly a half hour from the
time they had started they emerged into brighter light, the trees growing
sparse, the earth moist, a soft coolness rising--the creek's conjunction
with the tules.

The sun was sloping westward, the sky infinitely blue and clear, golden
light slanting across the plain's distant edges. Before them, silent, not
a breath stirring the close-packed growth, stretched the marshes. They
were miles in extent; miles upon miles of these level bulrush spears
threaded with languid streams, streams that curved and looped, turned
back upon themselves, narrowed into gleaming veins, widened to miniature
lakes on whose bosom the clouds, the birds and the stars were mirrored.
They were like a crystal inlay covering the face of the tules with an
intricate, shining pattern. No place was ever more deserted, alien,
uninhabitable, making no compromise with the friendly, fruitful land.

Against the muddy edge a rotten punt holding a pole swung deliberate from
a stake. The men put the box in, then followed, and the elder, standing
in the stern, took the pole and, pushing against the bank, drove the boat
into deep water. It floated out, two ripples folding back oily sleek from
its bow. After the Indian fashion, the man propelled it with the pole,
prodding against the bottom. He did it skillfully, the unwieldly hulk
making a slow, even progress. He also did it with a singular absence of
sound, the pole never grating on the gunnel, feeling quietly along the
soft mud of the shores, rising from the water, held suspended, then
slipping in again as noiseless as the dip of the dragon flies.

No words passed between them. Sliding silent over the silent stream, they
were like a picture done in a few strong colors, violent green of the
rushes, violent blue of the sky. Their reflection moved with them, two
boats joining at the water line, in each boat two figures, every fold of
their garments, every shade and high light, minutely and dazzlingly
reproduced.

Highwayman is a word of picturesque suggestion, but there was nothing
picturesque about them. They looked like laborers weather-worn from wind
and sun; the kind of men that crowd the streets of new camps and stand
round the cattle pens at country fairs. Knapp, sitting in the bow, was
younger than the other--under thirty probably. He was a big-boned,
powerful animal, his thick, reddish hair growing low on his forehead, his
face, with its wide nose and prominent jaw, like the study of a face left
in the rough. In his stolid look there was something childlike, his eyes
following the flight of a bird in the air, then dropping to see its
reflection in the water.

Garland was older, fully fifty, burly, thickset, strong as an ox. His hat
lay in the bottom of the boat and his head, covered with curly, grizzled
hair, was broad and well-shaped. A corresponding grizzle of beard clothed
his chin and fringed a straight line of lip. The rest of his face showed
the skin sun-dried and lined less from age than a life in the open.
Wrinkles radiated from the corners of his eyes, and one, like a fold in
the flesh, crossed his forehead in a deep-cut crease. His clothes were of
the roughest, a dirty collarless shirt with a rag of red bandanna round
the neck, a coat shapeless and dusty, and overalls grease and
mud-smeared with the rubbing of his hands. His boots were the iron-hard
clouts of the rancher, his hat a broken black felt, sweat-stained and
torn. Passing him on the road, you would have set him down as a farm hand
out of a job.

The boat had passed beyond the shelter of the hills to where the tules
widened. Pausing, he glanced about. Far to the right he could see a small
white square--the lodge of a sportsman's club which in the duck shooting
season would disgorge men and dogs into the marsh. It was closed now, but
on the plain beyond there were ranches. He dropped to his knees, shipped
the pole, and drew from the bottom of the boat a piece of wood roughly
shaped into a paddle. Here in the heart of the tules, where a head moving
over the bulrush floor might be discerned, sound would not carry far. He
dipped in the paddle, the long spray of drops hitting the water with a
dry, running patter.

The man in front moved and looked ahead.

"We'd ought to be near there."

"A few yards over to the right," came the answer, and with it the boat
took a sharp turn to the left, nosing along the bank, then stole down a
waterway, a crystal channel between ramparts of green. This looped at a
right angle, shone with a sudden glaze of sun, slipped into shadow and,
rounding a point, an island with a bare, oozy edge came into view.

A deep stroke of the paddle sent the boat forward, its bow burrowing into
the mud, and Knapp jumped out and beached it. The place was a small
islet, one side clear, a wall of rushes, thick as grass, clothing the
other. Over the water line the earth was hard, its surface cracked and
flaked by the sun. On this open space lay two battered kerosene oil cans,
their tops torn away, and a pile of stones. The hiding place was not a
new one and the properties were already prepared.

With a knife and chisel they broke open the box. The money was in small
canvas sacks, clean as if never used before and marked with a stenciled
"W. F. & Co." They took it out and looked at it; hefted its weight in
their hands. It represented the first success after several failures, one
brought to trial, others frustrated in the making or abandoned after
warnings from the ranchers and obscure townsfolk who stood in with them.
Knapp had been discouraged. Now he took a handful and spread it on his
palm, golden eagles, heavy, shining, solid. Swaying his wrist, he let the
sun play on them, strike glints from their edges, burnish their surface.

"Twelve thousand," he murmured. "We ain't but once before got that much."

The elder, pulling the gunny sack from his neck, dropped it into one of
the oil cans, pressing it against the sides like a lining.

"I can get the ranch now; six thousand'll cover everything."

"Are you honestly calculatin' to do that?" Knapp had reached for the
other can. With arm outstretched, he looked at Garland, gravely curious.

"I am. I told you so before. I had a look at it again last week. They'll
sell for four thousand, and it'll take five hundred to put it into shape.
I'll bank the rest."

"And you'll quit?"

"Certain. I've had enough of the road."

The younger man pondered, watching the hands of his partner fitting the
money bags into the can. "Mebbe you got the right idea," he muttered.

"It's the right idea for me. I'm not what I once was, I'm old. It's time
for me to lay off and rest. I can't keep this up forever and now I got
the chance to get out and I'm goin' to."

He had filled his can and rose, taking off his coat and throwing it on
the ground. Picking up the knife and chisel he went back to where the
bulrushes began and crushed in among them. Knapp, packing the other can,
could hear the sound of his heavy movements, the hacking of the knife at
the bulrush stalks and then the thud of falling earth. When he had filled
his can he saw that there were two sacks left over. He took them up and,
looking about, caught sight of a newspaper protruding from the pocket of
Garland's coat. He pulled it out, calling as he did so:

"There's two sacks I can't get in. I'm goin' to put 'em in this here
paper you got."

A grunt of acquiescence came from the bulrushes, the hacking of the
knife, the thuds going on. Knapp unfolded the paper, set the sacks in it,
and, gathering it about them, placed it on the top of his can. He heaved
the whole up and crashed through the rushes to where Garland had already
cleared a space and was digging a hole in the mud. When it was finished,
the cans--the newspaper bundle on top--were lowered into it, and earth
and roots replaced. No particular attempt was made at concealment; the
cache was as secure against intrusion as if it were on the crest of the
Sierra, and within the week they would be back to empty it. The box was
filled with stones and sunk in the stream.

Then they rested, prone on the ground, at first talking a little. There
was a question about the messenger; Knapp had shot and was casually
confident he had only winged him. The matter seemed to give him no
anxiety, and presently, his head burrowed into his arm, he fell asleep,
a great, sprawled figure with the sun making his red hair shine like a
copper helmet.

Garland lay on his back, his coat for a pillow, smoking a blackened pipe
and thinking. He saw the sky lose its blue, and fade to a thin, whitish
transparency, then flush to rose, bird specks skimming across it. He saw
the tules grow dark, black walls flanking paths incredibly glossy,
catching here and there a barring of golden cloud. He felt the breath of
the marshes chill and salt-tainted, and watched the first star, white as
a diamond, prick through the vault.


Then he rose and shook his partner, waking him with voluble profanity.
The night had come, the dark that was to hide their stealthy exit. They
went different ways; Knapp by a series of trails and planks to the south
bank and thence across country, footing it through the night to his lair
near Stockton. Garland would move north to friends of his up toward the
mining camps along the Feather. They made a rendezvous for a night six
days distant. Then they would carry away the money to places of safety
which they went to prepare.

The sky was star-strewn as Garland's punt slipped away from the island.
It was intensely still, a whisper of water round the moving prow, the
sibilant dip of the paddle the only sounds. He could see the water as a
pale, winding shimmer ahead, dotted with star reflections like small,
scattered flowers. Once, rising to make sure of his course, he saw the
tiny yellow light in a ranch house far away. He stood for a moment
looking at it, and when he crouched again the light had kindled his
imagination. Its spark glowed wide till it showed the ranch kitchen,
windows open to the blue night, earth smells floating in, the table with
its kerosene lamp, the rancher reading the paper, his dog sleeping at
his feet, peaceful, unguarded, secure.

Conscious of distance to be traversed before he became a creature of wary
instincts and watchful eyes, he let his thoughts have way. They slipped
about and touched the future with a sense of ease, then veered to the
past. Here they steadied, memories rising photographically distinct like
a series of pictures, detached yet revealing an underlying thread of
connection:

First it was his youth in the Southwest when he had been Tom Michaels, a
miner, well paid, saving his wages. Then his marriage with Juana Ramirez,
the half-breed girl at Deming, and the bit of land he had bought--with a
mortgage to pay--in the glaring, green river valley. Glimpses of their
life there, children and work--stupefying, tremendous work--to keep them
going and to meet the interest; he had been a giant in those days.

And even so he hadn't been able to do it. Six years after they took
possession they moved out, ruined. He remembered it as if it had been
yesterday--the adobe house with its flat roof and strings of red peppers
hanging on the walls, the cart piled high with furniture, Juana on the
front seat and Pancha astride of the mule. Juana had grown old in those
six years, fat and shapeless, but she had been dog-loyal, dog-loving, his
woman. Never a word of complaint out of her--even when the two children
died she had just covered her head with the blanket and sat by the
hearth, stoical, dry-eyed, silent.

He could see now that it was his dream of making money--big money--that
had been wrong. If he'd been content with a wage and a master he'd have
done better by her, but from the start he'd wanted his freedom, balked at
being roped and branded with the herd. That was why he drifted back to
mining, not a steady job, though he could have got it, but as a
prospector, leaving Arizona and moving to California. There were years of
it; he knew the mineral belt from the Panamint mountains to the Kootenai
country. Juana and Pancha plodded from town to town, seeing him at
intervals, always expecting to hear he'd struck "the ledge," and be
hardly able to scrape a living for them from the bottom of his pan.

One picture stood out clearer than the rest, ineffaceable, to be carried
to his grave--the day he came back and heard that Juana was dead. He had
left them at a place in Inyo, a scattering of houses on the edge of the
desert. Pancha saw him coming, and her figure, racing to meet him in a
blown flutter of cotton skirt, was as plain before his eyes as if she
were running toward him now along the shining water path. She was twelve,
brown as a nut, and scarecrow-thin, with a tangle of black hair, and
narrow, dark eyes. He could recall the feel of her little hard hand
inside his as she told him, excited at imparting such news, pushing the
hair off her dirty face to see how he took it.

It had crushed the heart in him and some upholding principle of hope and
resolution broke. He found a place for Pancha with Maria Lopez, the
Mexican woman who ran the Buon Gusto restaurant at Bakersfield and
agreed to look after the girl for pay. Then he went back to the open,
not caring much, the springs of his soul gone dry. He had no energy for
the old life and did other things, anything to make his own food and
Pancha's keep--herded sheep, helped on the cattle ranges, tended store,
hung on the fringes of the wilderness, saw men turn to savages and
turned himself.

At long intervals he went down to the settlements and saw Pancha, growing
into a gawky girl, headstrong, and with the wildness of her mother's
people cropping out. She hated Maria Lopez and the work in the restaurant
and wanted him to take her to the mountains. When she was sixteen a spell
of illness laid him up and after that he had difficulty in getting work.
Two months passed without a payment and when he finally got down to
Bakersfield he found that Pancha had gone, run away with a traveling
company of actors. Maria Lopez and he had a fight, raged at one another
in mutual fury, and then he started out to find his girl, not knowing
when he did what he would do with her.

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