Pay Dirt and Other Whispering Sands Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert

Law of the Ghost Town

I told him that I didn’t want the job of deputy, and he talked me into it.

“You’re fearless, handy with a gun, know the desert, and know the men,” he said.

When a man hands out that much of a line with a deputy badge, there ain’t much to say except to take the badge. I took the badge. Bob Zane, deputy sheriff of Bodie!

Of course Bodie ain’t much any more. There are a few of the old mines working, and mostly they’re held by the old timers who have confidence in the future of the place only because they remember its past. Back in the early days, Bodie was a live town. Plenty live! They still talk about the Bad Man from Bodie. But now it squats up on the crest of a ridge, in a high depression, right up among the clouds, with the desert mountains all around it. The old buildings, built, for the most part, out of flattened tin cans, still stand.

Every once in a while there’s some sort of a dispute, where men get personal; and I guess Bob Clark, the sheriff, sort of figured that he could save himself some trips over there to Bodie if he had a deputy residing on the ground. — Not that I was permanent. But I’d be there for a matter of six months yet.

This man Sellers drifted in, and I don’t know just why it was I didn’t like him. He certainly put himself out enough to be agreeable to me. I couldn’t place him, yet I couldn’t like him. He wore boots and breeches, which is usually the sign of a mining engineer or a tenderfoot in the desert. And he was interested in the Pinto Mountain district.

“I’d certainly appreciate it, Mr. Zane,” he said, in that purring voice of his, “if you could introduce me to some one who is familiar with that Pinto district.”

I started to ask him why; but asking questions is one thing the desert man ain’t very good at, so I just nodded.

“There ain’t nobody in town right now that knows that district,” I told him. “But you stick around, and Tom and Harry will be driftin’ in. They pick around those Pinto Mountains all the time.”

He let his lips slide back far enough to show me a whole assortment of gold teeth. I started to tell him that if there was as much gold in the hills as there was in his mouth, the prospectors would sure get rich. But I didn’t.

“Who,” he wanted to know, “are Tom and Harry?”

“Prospectors — old timers. Harry’s got a busted heart, and he’s out forgetting it.”

I don’t know why I told him that. It was Harry’s business, not mine — and certainly not this guy Sellers’. But there was a funny thing about the man’s eyes — the way they rested on you, and all. They made you start telling things.

“Oh,” he said, “he’s a young man, then! I thought you said they were old timers.”

“I did, and they are,” I said, sort of nettled because I’d told him so much. Then, as he fastened those eyes on me again, I heard myself telling him more.

“It was back when the old Butterfly Dance Hall was running wide open,” I told him. “There was a dance hall girl named Kate. Maybe she had another name; nobody ever heard it. She was just Kate. She was just the same as all dance hall girls, in lots of ways; and in lots of ways she wasn’t.

“She got so she was like a big sister to the men. She encouraged ’em when their claims were petered out, or when the assay didn’t show up so good; and she’d go out and nurse ’em when they were sick.

“Harry fell in love with her, and she fell in love with him. There was a gambler that wanted her, too. They all had it out one night, over in the Butterfly. — That’s been forty years ago. Kate offered to go with Harry. She was quitting the dance hall racket. She loved Harry, all right, and Harry loved her. But Harry had some of the old New England notions in his head. He wouldn’t marry her because she had been a dance hall girl — no matter how much he loved her.

“The gambler grabbed her in his arms that night. Harry walked out of the dance hall. She stayed there in the gambler’s arms; but her eyes, over the gambler’s shoulder, were watching Harry. He looked back at the door and saw her. Her eyes were all filled with tears. He tells about it — to his close friends. — He’s been in the desert ever since, trying to forget.”

Sellers flashed his gold teeth at me again. “A very pretty tale, Mr. Zane. And what happened to the girl from the dance hall? Was she happy with the gambler?”

“She didn’t go with the gambler,” I said, “not long enough to get married. Before the preacher came, the girl had gone — out into the desert perhaps. Harry realized his mistake then, and he tried to find her. He couldn’t. Years later he struck it pretty rich, and he spent most of the money on detectives, trying to trace the woman. He never found her.”

Sellers nodded. He seemed pretty satisfied with himself and superior — that smug sort of a superiority that a city man gets when he’s talking with some one from the country.

“A dance hall girl wouldn’t amount to much,” he said.

“Don’t ever lose sight of the fact that human beings are human beings,” I told him. “And don’t ever kid yourself that dance hall girls aren’t human!”

There was a little edge on my tone. Kate had been in Bodie long before my time, but I’d heard stories of how she nursed the men — particularly the time there was an epidemic of smallpox in Bodie. Men who have lived their lives out in the open don’t forget that sort of thing.

And then Tom and Harry showed up, right while I was talking with Sellers. I just had time to give him a word of caution.

“In talking with Tom,” I told him, “don’t ever let on that you know anything about Harry’s history; and of course the same thing goes for Harry. And don’t ever make any slurring remarks about dance hall girls when you’re talking with either of them.”

He surveyed the two figures coming down the dusty road, a string of burros behind them.

“You mean those two bums?” he asked. The word had slipped out without thought on his part. I doubt if he even knew he’d said it.

“Yes,” I said, “the two gentlemen coming along here with the string of burros.”

“Give me an introduction, will you?”

“You don’t need one in this part of the world,” I told him, “but you can sort of stick around when I start talking to ’em. When Harry gets lit up, he gets to thinking it’s still the old days, and he goes and digs up his six-gun and cuts her loose. As the representative of law and order in these parts, I’ve got to have a talk with him.”

And I moved forward.

They recognized me when I was forty or fifty yards away, and Harry let out a whoop. Tom was the quiet one, almost taciturn, even with those he knew best. Harry was more of a mixer.

I grinned, walked up and shook hands all around. They looked at Sellers, and he showed them his mouthful of gold teeth. I explained Sellers. “A newcomer,” I told them. “Interested in the Pinto Mountain country. I told him you could tell him anything he wanted to know about that territory.”

Sellers showed them the teeth again.

Harry whipped off his old Stetson, slapped it against his leg. A cloud of white dust flew up.

“See that dust, stranger?” he asked.

Sellers nodded.

“Well,” said Harry, “that there’s dust from the Pinto Mountains; and so help me, stranger, there’s a hell of a lot left where that came from!”

He laughed, a dry, desert cackle.

Sellers waited just a tenth of a second too long, and then he joined in the laugh with a well-groomed haw-haw.

I took Harry off to one side.

“Harry, how long you been on the wagon?”

“Five years,” he said. “When I get too much of the stuff, I get to thinkin’ Bodie is back in the boom days an’ I strap on my six-gun an’—”

“I know,” I told him. “Going to get drunk this time?”

He shook his head. “Why?” he wanted to know.

“Because,” I told him, “I’m the law in these parts now.”

He looked me over, and I could see the little wrinkles around his desert-bleached eyes begin to deepen.

“Well,” he said, grinning, “they’re sure as hell careless who they get for dep’ties around here!” And he reached out and gripped my hand.

I knew then I wouldn’t ever have any trouble with Harry. I looked over at Tom. He and Sellers had gone into a huddle, and Tom was showing him some specimens of rock that they’d brought from the Pinto Mountain country. Sellers was shaking his head gloomily.

I said a few words to Tom, and then went on. Sellers stayed behind.

Late that night, I heard the sound of a gunshot. Then there was a whoop and a couple of more shots. I rolled out of my blankets and reached for my gun. Three more shots rang out quick, and I heard the bullet from one of them as it tore into the tin of a building across the street.

I began to poke around the streets. Bodie is a ghost town. There are a few people who live there, but for the most part they’re the holdovers of a past generation. The buildings are all ghosts — ghosts with strange memories. Walking through the silent streets at midnight, I felt like a man prowling around in a cemetery.

I saw a man running. He saw me and slowed to a walk. I crossed over to him. It was Sellers.

“You’re up late,” I told him.

The starlight showed me his face well enough so that I could tell he was making teeth at me again.

“You folks may consider twelve-thirty late. In the city, I don’t usually go to bed before one or two.”

I looked down at his hand. “Hear any shots?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Were there shots?”

“Six,” I said. “What you got in your hand?”

“A rock,” he said.

“Rock?”

“Yes. I... er... I picked it up. I was a little afraid to be walking home through the dark streets unarmed, so I picked up a rock.”

He tossed it away into the darkness. It hit with a plump in the dust of the road. There weren’t any more shots.

“I’ll walk up to where you’re going,” I said. “Then you won’t have to pick up any more rocks.”

There was whisky on his breath.

We walked up to the place where he was staying. He said good night, and didn’t seem very cordial about it. I wasn’t any more cordial than he was. After he had gone in I went back to where he’d tossed the rock.

I groped around for a while in the dust of the road, and then I found it. It was heavy. I took it home.

In the morning I looked at it. It was just rock, as far as I was concerned, only it was awfully heavy. I put it away and looked around town.

A little later I saw Tom. He looked kind of sheepish.

“I heard some shots last night,” I told him.

He was anxious. “Nobody was hurt?” he asked.

“Not that I heard of,” I told him. “Don’t you know?”

“No, how should I know?”

“That’s right,” I told him, and then I waited a few seconds so that it would seem just significant enough.

“Where’s Harry?” I asked.

He stared at me. “Don’t you know?”

“No. Why?”

“Nothing, only I... er... I kinda thought that maybe you’d taken him and put him to bed somewhere. You know — sort of locked him up for something.”

“What would I lock him up for, Tom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.”

He looked at me for a few seconds.

“When you see him,” I said, “tell him that I want to talk with him.”

He fidgeted around a bit. “I guess I got a new partner,” he blurted.

“New partner?”

“Yes. In a way. It ain’t a partner — not a general partner — just a partner in a prospect. It’s a funny sort of prospect, too. Sellers was telling me how much he knew about certain formations in the Pinto Mountains. We had some funny rock I’d picked up there. We came on a ledge of it. It looked ordinary, but it was awfully heavy. We filed on it, just to be doing something.

“I showed Sellers the rock and asked him if he knew what it was. He said it didn’t amount to much. He wouldn’t give five cents for a carload of it. But last night Harry sold his interest in that claim. — Leastwise, Sellers said he did. — Sellers said he was called in as a witness. Harry was selling out to some chap Sellers said was named J. Stanley Petersen. He says he was called on to sign the instrument as a witness.”

“J. Stanley Petersen!” I said. “Who’s he?”

“I don’t know. I thought you would know.”

“I never heard of him.”

“Uh-huh,” said Tom.

He kept shuffling around in the dusty road. He had nothing else to say. Nevertheless he stuck around. I knew there was something on his mind. For the space of a cigarette or two, we sat and looked at the cloud shadows on the hills. Then Tom said what had been on his mind.

“Somebody got into my saddle bags last night.”

“Steal something?” I asked.

“Ore samples,” he said.

I thought for a while. “Take a walk with me,” I told him, and led him up to the place where I had my blankets. I picked up the rock that Sellers had been carrying, tossed it over to him.

“Ever see that before?”

His eyes bulged. “Gee,” he said. “That’s a piece of that Pinto rock.”

“Stolen from your saddle bags?” I asked, getting ready to get some action that would pull the lips of Sellers down over his gold teeth for a while.

He shook his head. “No. That’s the piece that came from Harry’s pocket. He was carrying that piece around with him. Just sort of trying to find out what it was. I had some bigger specimens. Those were the ones that were stolen.”

“You don’t know where Harry is?”

“No.”

“Didn’t I once hear you boys say something to the effect that you had some sort of an agreement by which Harry had only forty-nine percent of a claim?”

“Oh, we had some sort of an agreement that Harry’d have forty-nine per cent. I was to have control. That was because Harry was impulsive at times.”

“Okay,” I told him. “I’d remember that. When this J. Stanley Petersen shows up, I’d be sort of hard-boiled. I don’t think I’d do anything that he wanted me to do. I’d be inclined to keep the mine undeveloped, if he wanted to develop it. And if he wanted to bring in capital, I’d prefer to sit tight with it, see?”

His face lit up. “You’d be a witness that Harry only had a forty-nine per cent interest in our partnership?”

“I’d be a witness,” I told him. “I remember you boys talking about that other claim. Maybe a lot of it was kidding, but I remember what was said. I can even repeat the words, though I can’t repeat the tone of voice.”

“That’s white of you, Bob Zane,” he said, and shook my hand.

“When you see Harry, tell him I want to have a talk with him,” I told him as I walked away.

I took the rock sample back and put it in my blanket roll, and then I sort of skirmished around. I didn’t find any one who had ever heard of J. Stanley Petersen, nor did I see anything of Harry.

That night it looked as though Harry had folded up and gone somewhere. Nobody’d seen him all day. It was funny.

I unrolled my blankets late and crawled in. Something seemed to be hitting my mind in connection with those blankets. I couldn’t go to sleep right away, thinking about it. Then I remembered. It was that bit of rock. I’d put it in the blanket roll.

I got up and looked around for it. It was gone.

J. Stanley Petersen showed up. He was a flat-chested guy with guinea-pig teeth, and eyes that blinked out from behind thick smoked glasses. It was hard to see into his eyes, back of those glasses.

He had the bill of sale, all signed by Harry and witnessed by Sellers. Sellers claimed he didn’t know the man at all, that he’d just seen him talking with Harry, and that Harry had asked him to sign his name as a witness to the transfer of a claim.

Sellers said he asked Harry if he knew just what he was doing, and that Harry had taken him off to one side and whispered that the rock didn’t have anything in it. It was just heavy, and Petersen was a tenderfoot with a chunk of money to invest. He’d gone crazy over the rock merely because it was heavy, and he had been willing to pay some real money for Harry’s interest.

That was the same story that Petersen gave. It was a question of the word of two men against that of nobody. Harry’s signature was genuine, all right. Tom admitted that. And that was all that counted — that signature.

They found out about the fifty-one per cent owned by Tom. The instrument that Petersen had drawn up merely called for a sale of all of Harry’s interest in the mine.

Petersen had ideas about operation. Tom was convinced that those ideas weren’t any good. After a while, Petersen got the idea. Tom was going to play a game of opposites with him. Anything Petersen wanted Tom didn’t. Anything Petersen mentioned that he didn’t want, Tom was for. That made a deadlock.

By that time, almost everybody in the whole camp was interested in the thing, from a standpoint of seeing what was going to happen next. Opinions were divided about the rock. Most of the boys had seen the samples. Some of them thought that Petersen and Sellers were a pair of slick ones who were looking for something, and that they’d stumbled on to what they were looking for, in the rock that Tom and Harry had brought in. But those people had to admit that Petersen seemed to be a fool and that the rock didn’t seem to have any possibilities.

There was also the gang that figured Petersen and Sellers were plain fool tenderfeet who had gone ahead and bit off something that they didn’t know anything about chewing. Every one suspected that Petersen and Sellers knew each other, and had known each other when the deal was made — in spite of the fact that they claimed they’d been strangers.

Over all there brooded the blue-black sky of the desert, the desert silence, and the little whispering winds that sent the sand scurrying along on the wings of the wind, making mysterious whispers against the sagebrush as it hissed its way across the desert.

Tom did the logical thing, of course. He started back into the Pinto Mountain country to get some samples of the ore. He was going to have them taken to a first class assayer and find out exactly where he stood.

He outfitted his burros, and started down through the cañons, and over toward the barren, heat-distorted ridges. Just before he went, Petersen came to him with an offer. He’d give a thousand dollars cash for the outstanding fifty-one per cent.

Tom came to me to get my advice. I didn’t have any. It was a gamble. All I was interested in was the mystery of this missing rock — and the whereabouts of Harry.

So Tom turned down the offer and plodded on out into the desert. The town of Bodie settled back into its patient waiting.

The old ghost camp had waited for years. Time, there, seemed to be different from what it was in the bigger places. The whole camp seemed to have been sucked into the patient silence of the desert. Clocks didn’t seem to measure time there any more; time was something that couldn’t be measured. The future was all mixed up in the present, and the past dominated both. You can’t describe it. It’s the rhythm of eternity which sways everything in the desert.

Tom didn’t come back, but Harry showed up. He came into the camp one day, clear-eyed and thin-lipped.

People questioned him about the sale of the mine. He looked at the instrument of sale, and nodded his head. That was all. When he was questioned as to where he’d been or what he’d done, his lips just got the tighter. He seemed to have taken over Tom’s nature. He wasn’t the loquacious one any more; he was taciturn and broody. He kept looking into the purple distances, looking over toward the Pintos.

Then he came to me. He sat on his heels in the shade for a while, rolling a cigarette, getting it to burn, seeping smoke out through the corners of his tight lips. I knew he had something to say, so I waited patiently.

After a while he fished into his pocket. “Bob,” he said, “I’m going to give you something that no one else has got.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Knowledge of the exact place where Tom went,” he said. And he pushed a map into my hand, a map that was all tied up with various landmarks. I saw he’d taken a lot of time making that map.

“You sold your interest in the mine,” I said.

He nodded, “I sold what interest I had,” he admitted.

“Then these others must know just where the mine is.”

Crow’s feet sprang up all around the edges of his eyes. “That instrument of sale was hurriedly drawn,” he said. “I was dead drunk when I signed it. But I left right afterwards. I’m bound by what’s in that instrument, that’s all.”

“Well?” I asked.

“That claim ain’t been recorded,” he said. “Tom was the owner of the controlling interest, and he didn’t want to record it.”

“Do you mean to tell me that Petersen doesn’t know where the mine is — the mine in which he owns a forty-nine per cent interest?”

He looked at me and grinned. “I ain’t telling you anything,” he said, “except the route that Tom took and the place he was to go to. I want you to go look Tom up.”

“Look Tom up?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s been gone too long.”

I thought that over. “Tom’s a desert-wise individual,” I told Harry. “He doesn’t need to have some one ride herd over him every time he gets off the beaten track.”

Harry was obstinate. “I wish,” he said, “that you’d look him up. Certain people have been looking around, getting data on Tom’s full name and who his heirs would be if anything happened to him.”

I whistled. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. There ain’t all the cards on the table in this deal. For certain reasons, I’ve got to stay here. I can’t leave. I’m telling you that I wish you’d take this route that Tom took — and see what you find. I’ve got a string of burros all ready to start.”

He didn’t say any more after that. He’d made his point, and that was all there was to it. He sat on his heels and smoked.

I smoked a cigarette in silence, thinking it over. Then I got up.

“Where are the burros?” 1 wanted to know.

“I’ve got ’em down a cañon where no one will see ’em. You can start any time you’re ready.”

“I’m ready,” I said, getting up.

He led the way. The string was all packed. I swung into the saddle and moved down the cañon. By nightfall I was in the real desert, down off the real high places, and into the high barrens. I was still over a mile above sea level, but I was steadily working downward.

The next day was a torture of heat. But I was used to the desert. The horizons danced a devil-dance. Here and there, black buzzards were dots against the deep blue of the sky. I kept plugging along.

That night the desert started to talk. Unless you’ve heard it, you’ll never realize how the desert talks. The sand slithers along on the wings of the sudden night winds that spring up, and the whole face of the desert becomes alive with sand whispers. Rolled out in your blankets, under the stars, clasped to the bosom of the desert, you can almost hear the desert breathe and talk.

I drifted off to sleep with the desert whispering; and perhaps it was the sound of the sand, perhaps just my imagination, but I dreamt of the old romance between Harry and the dance hall girl. I seemed to be living through the moment when she had given Harry his choice and Harry had turned his back on romance and love.

The desert had known the emptiness of his heart. The desert must have known of the dry bitterness of his hatred of the man who had taken the girl he loved. Too late, he had found out what that love meant to him, how much of his life it was.

Then I slept more soundly, awaking to find the desert graying to dawn. I got the string in, packed, and was away while it was still cool.

Before the sun was up an hour, I found him. There was a pile of bones; there were the remnants of a pack — empty canteens — all the signs of a desert tragedy. It looked as though he’d lashed himself to his burro when he found himself giving out, so that the animal could lead him to water. But neither animal nor man had made it.

It was pretty late to read trail, but I did the best I could. Those canteens interested me. I couldn’t see how a man like Tom ever would have allowed himself to run out of water in the desert — not unless there’d been some very unforeseen accident. I looked the canteens over.

I shook out dry sand particles. Those sand particles were on the inside of the canteen. That’s a trick that’s been worked, off and on, by men who are human fiends and who have wanted to murder without the danger of being caught, or risking a face-to-face conflict. Fill a man’s reserve canteens with dry sand. The weight is there, and he thinks he’s packing a reserve supply of water. When he goes to fill up his smaller canteens, he finds he’s out of water in the middle of the desert.

I squatted down by the bones and thought things over. Then I started back for Bodie. And I made it a lot quicker than I’d made it on the road out. I was pushing the burros for all they were worth. I was in a hurry. I thought I was beginning to get the answer.

Finally I swung down the pass from the divide and into the plateau, the cup-like depression which marks the location of the ghost city.

On the street I found one of the old prospectors. I tried to make my tone casual, and asked for Harry. He chuckled.

“Gettin’ ready for a shootin’,” he said.

I stiffened. “Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. You know how he used to be with liquor. Well, he’s gone the same way again. That taste he had that night loosed the fire in his blood, I guess. He’s taken up with some new chap that’s here, and they’ve hoisted a few, just in moderation. But to-night they started out goin’ after their hooch serious. — And, say! Guess who’s in town? Lita Cooper!”

“Who?” I asked, my mind on Harry. “Who is Lita Cooper?”

“She’s Tom’s daughter. Nobody ever thought much of his last name, but it was really Cooper. And his daughter’s out here for a visit. Seems like somebody got up a contest of some kind and put up a prize of a trip to the old mining camp of Bodie. She knew her dad was out here, and she entered the contest — and won. — We never heard of the contest out here, but Lita won it, and she’s here. This guy with the gold teeth is showing her around the town — the old buildings and all that stuff.”

I digested that information. The contest had probably seemed innocent enough to Lita. She had inherited the old man’s mine, though it couldn’t be worth much. She controlled a fifty-one per cent interest.

She’d come to town; Harry was drunk; and Sellers was piloting her over the town. It didn’t look like a good combination to me, and it didn’t look like just an accident, either. It had all happened with too much regularity, too much purpose.

I didn’t have enough on Sellers to arrest him. I couldn’t prove anything. I could only think. But I was thinking a lot, and I could get to the girl before she signed any papers. That’d help.

I started looking for this daughter of Tom’s. Half-way down the street I got the news. She’d signed some papers. It had all been conducted as if it was a joke. They’d persuaded her to sit in one of the old office buildings and sign away all of her rights to any mine she might own. It had been a grand lark. No one knew exactly what was in the paper she had signed. She hadn’t even read it herself. Sellers had flashed his gold teeth, and it had been handled like a lark all the way through.

I started on the run. Some one said they were down in the old Butterfly Dance Hall. That’s a part of the city that’s truly deserted, and almost nobody ever goes there except an occasional straggler from the outside who wants to see what the town once looked like that produced the most notorious bad-men of the West. I had the district to myself.

Then I heard laughter and the shuffle of feet in the old dance hall.

I pushed my face up against a window. She was trim and well formed, and she was laughing. She was dancing with Sellers, just a few steps of a dance without music. Presently they paused and made bows to an imaginary audience. Their faces were smiling, the girl’s with the joy of life and of youth, Sellers with that smirk that an older man has when he’s trying to act young, and when he’s just put something across.

And while I was watching, I saw another face against a window on the other side. It was Harry’s distorted face, and he was crazy drunk. I could tell it. He stared with reddened, glazed eyes, then he lurched around to the front door and walked in.

“There you are!” he bellowed.

Sellers looked at him, and his face lost the glitter of gold teeth. Though it was moonlight, I could see the thing indistinctly. When I’d first seen Harry, the moon had been shining strong on his face. When he walked inside I could see pretty well, but not well enough.

Things happened so quickly then that I didn’t have a chance to get caught up with events until they’d moved on to become a part of other events.

Harry weaved across the floor. “I’ve been looking for you, Caspar Moray, for years. You’ve got her with you, too! They said you’d treated her bad. Maybe it’s so. — Hand her over. She’s mine!”

It flashed on me then. Harry, drunk as a lord, had been put away some place with the idea that he must be kept out of the way. He had broken loose, come to the dance hall, and was reenacting the scenes of the old tragedy that had ruined his life. The man in the center of the floor was the gambler, so far as Harry was concerned, and the woman was Dance-Hall Kate.

I wondered if she had looked like this, that Dance-Hall Kate, back in the dim long ago when the town of Bodie had been a roaring camp. If she had, she’d been a mighty attractive woman — slender and willowy with energy and life force, her every motion a thing of grace.

Then, suddenly, Sellers seemed to get the idea. “Harry,” he said, “you are crazy. I’m your friend. This isn’t the old Bodie. This is the ghost city!”

Harry weaved on his feet, laughed scornfully, waved a hand around at the cobwebby walls. “Yeah! And all these people, this dance orchestra. These gambling tables — they’re just things that ain’t, huh?”

Sellers tried to explain. Then he saw Harry’s crouching attitude, his hands holding the rigid fingers wide-spread, crooked, like claws, the right hand hovering over the butt of the big, holstered forty-five that swung at his right hip.

Sellers made his fatal mistake. He went into a panic, and his hand streaked for his hip pocket.

There in the vivid desert moonlight I had a chance to see things as they had been in the old days. I saw Harry’s hand streak into motion so swift that you could hardly see it. The gun was a single-action. I couldn’t see the mechanics of the draw, nor the way the gun was cocked. But I could see Seller’s snub-nosed automatic, the deadly weapon which modem science has perfected for the killer, come out and spit into action. There was no question but what that small, light, well-balanced automatic handicapped Harry at the outset.

Yet Harry’s skill and speed actually made up for that handicap! The single-action roared, and the automatic spat. Of course, I couldn’t be quite certain, but it seemed to me that the shots from the single-action crashed out even faster than the shots from the automatic.

This much was certain: they were more accurate.

Ever see a man get shot? The bullets sound with a peculiar thunk! as they plunk into him. The dust whips up from his clothes in a fine powder, a twisting bit of dim white that spirals upward.

There were three of those little white spirals in the air about Sellers before he went down. Then he went hard.

The woman screamed and ran from the building. Harry laughed, a demoniac laugh of triumph, lurched forward and fell into a drunken stupor. He was unhurt.

I caught the girl. “Listen, Lita, I was your father’s friend,” I said.

She struggled against me. “Let me go, let me go! It’s awful. It’s murder!”

I held her by main force, and calmed her until I didn’t need to use force.

“Promise me you’ll do this much,” I said. “Go to your room and say nothing. This man Sellers murdered your father.”

She gasped. “Father — I”

I gave it to her, straight from the shoulder. If she was Tom Cooper’s daughter, she’d have the old stuff in her, I knew. She’d be able to take it on the chin. I handed it to her straight.

She did take it on the chin, though she became very white, very silent. She promised she’d do as I said.

I walked into the dance hall. Sellers was dead. Three shots had hit him. My hat brim would have covered all three. Harry was just drunk — crazy, blind, stupid drunk.

I went through Seller’s pockets. I found the paper signed by the girl. I took it and put it in my pocket. The rest of the things I left as they were.

Getting Harry onto my shoulder was a job. I hoisted him and walked slowly through the shadows. I didn’t put him down on the ground until I was three hundred yards from the place. Then I took his old gun and belt. There was the ruins of an old mine there. The shaft had partially caved, but there was an opening, a black hole in the ground. The timber had rotted, and no one would think of going down there now. I tossed Harry’s gun and belt down there.

After a while I went back to Lita. I told her the whole story. She was Tom Cooper’s daughter, all right; she just clamped her lips together and listened.

After that, we went out and walked up and down the street, casually, so that no one would think she’d last been with Sellers.

They didn’t find Sellers until the next noon. How he’d died was a mystery. But the gun was in his hand, and he’d been shooting at some one.

They notified me. I notified the sheriff. He came over by fast machine.

Harry came awake eventually, and I handed him the news. “Sellers is dead,” I said. “Somebody shot him.”

He stared at me with sagging jaw.

“Gosh!” he said. “That changes things! Thank heaven I got two alibis. The first is, I was too drunk to move. The second is that I couldn’t find my gun.

“You know, sometimes when I get on a spree I start shootin’ up the town. This time I couldn’t find any gun when I woke up.”

I nodded, and told him of finding Tom and of Lita’s being in town. His bloodshot eyes narrowed.

“A frame-up,” he said. “They knew she was coming, and they got me drunk so I’d be out of the way. She didn’t sign anything, did she?”

I shook my head. “She signed some foolish papers, but it was just a prank. There wasn’t anything on the paper except a Mother Goose rhyme.”

He took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “now I can tell you—”

I interrupted. “That you got drunk before and sold your mine interest. You knew something was fishy about it, and so you went into Tom’s saddle bags while he was asleep, got the rest of the ore samples, dusted out, went across the desert to an assayer some place, had ’em assayed, found out the mine was rich in some rare form of ore that the ordinary prospector doesn’t know about, came back here to tip off Tom — and found he’d gone.”

He stared at me. “How’d you know?”

“I just guessed,” I said. “You’ve said nothing about it, and I wouldn’t. You can tell Lita. She’s a daughter of Tom.”

He straightened. “I’ll go to her,” he said. “That ore was tellurium. It didn’t look like gold, but it’s really rich with it.”

I went over and met the sheriff. We went over the ground of the shooting pretty carefully.

He looked at me. “Funny. They tell me they heard the shots. But Harry was drunk, and he always shoots up the town when he gets drunk. Only, it’s the old part of town, where the life used to be, and where nobody lives any more. So they let him shoot. They figured the shots were from Harry’s gun.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He was too drunk to move, though, and he ain’t seen his gun for a long time. It’s missing.”

The sheriff stroked his chin. “I hate to have a plain case of murder go unsolved,” he said.

I thought of the bones out there on the desert. “Oh, I don’t know,” I told him. “This ain’t like a city. The desert has its own way of settling things. Probably Sellers fired the first shot at whoever did it. He had his gun in his hand, and he’d shot three times.”

Bob Clark sighed. “For a deputy,” he said, looking me over, “you somehow take a funny view of the shooting. If you’d been on the job, you’d have investigated those shots.”

I unpinned the star and handed it over.

J. Stanley Petersen faded out of town. They never saw him again. After a while, the owners of the fifty-one per cent interest in the mine froze out the outstanding minority interest. Harry’s got that interest now. He doesn’t get drunk any more.

The town of Bodie still lays sprawled in the sunlight, with the desert winds whispering across the sand just as it always has. The desert has ways of her own of doing things.

Some people might think that it was all a part of some scheme of things, the way Harry’s heart was broken in the old dance hall, the way they tried to get rid of him when Lita came to town by getting him drunk, and the crazy notion that made him go back to the old dance hall and start shooting. — I don’t know. I just know what happened.