A Fifteen-Cent Meal

by Raymond S. Spears

H, THERE!”

A voice checked the gait of several men shuffling forth in the early morning.

“No. 11-408, drop out!”

“Yes, sir!” a chunky, bow-legged, flat-faced man nodded, answering as he slipped from the rambling group.

“You're going back today, y'know!”

“Yes, sir!”

The numbered man stood with his back to a cluster of weatherbeaten tents along a new roadway, looking across at a precipice opposite against the face of which was a miles-long descending line like a scratch. The mark was a cutbank highway which led into the enormous notch, the cañon entrance miles distant and some four thousand feet below, beyond which was a wide, placid breadth of sunny, green sageland of wide, rolling knolls.

The side-mountain tents were on either hand of a comparatively shallow gulch exit, up which grew quaking aspens amid broken stone. A galvanized two-inch pipe on X-top plank frames brought a jet of limpid water gurgling and thrusting into a concrete tank. A wheel catching the stream threw a pleasant fountain which rainbowed the air with its mist, a pulley and grind stone indicating the service of the surprizing [sic] power which it had amused and engrossed some handy man to construct.

Apparently ignored for the time, the man stood twisting his old hat in his stubby, fretted hands, his gaze following the course of the dugway from the far-away cañon foot, curving around points and turning back into the ravines, always climbing against the enormous slope until around the head of the cañon it crept up past the camp where he stood, his steel blue eyes squinting. Five hundred feet higher up, it swung to the right into Top Pass.

The boys were going out this morning to clean things, put some finishing touches here and there and make it look pretty. A few had been working there ever since spring. No. 11-408 had started work on that road away back around the cape down in the valley years before, when the penitentiary warden sent a few men out to patch the old double rut climb. He had laid his pick or shovel into every foot of that miles on miles of terrific stone. That was his road because one day, some ten years before, he had fifteen cents.

Exactly that. In those days he was Libra Cruvan, and quite a man in his way. He could ride anything from a bicycle to a wild, blue roan. It just happened that he walked into Cloudburst Valley, carrying his saddle and other equipment. He was footsore, for his horse had died under him, suffering from thirst, hunger and over-exercise. Cruvan's eyes were bloodshot, his gait stumbling, his hat drawn down over one of the hardest faces west of the Missouri, which is giving a man a considerable of an eminence at that.

He could see some horses down ahead of him. If they were right wild, his case was apparently hopeless. However, he wouldn't admit that. He stooped, dodged, crept and hunted among the juniper cedars, among the frost-shattered and water-rounded stones, and found a blessed trickle of sweet water to prove he had crossed some three desert ranges and three salt playas since this last time he started.

He drank, dozed, drank again, slept and awakened at last, astonishingly recuperated, considering how long he had scuffled along on his nerve. The sun of some day or other was setting. He sat up, looked around and then held out his rope, a good one for a fact, soft yet little worn.

He went down into the mouth of the gulch where he found the alluvial fan well grown to aspens, and below them, junipers. He worked rapidly along with astonishing quiet considering the boots he wore and the shape of his legs, their stubbiness and size. He was fairly creeping at the side of the oozing water in its course, passing the limpid pools, his eyes squinting, his brows drawn bushily over the hungry sunken pits. He froze suddenly, for on his left he heard a stone, a small cobble, rattling and bumping on a slope.

On the instant there was a wild rush of a dozen horses through the scattering cedars. He had been working into the breeze, and the animals had caught his scent. They were baffled by the eddying of the zephyrs, however, and came dashing by him in the part-gloom of first star-light. Cruvan bounded, rope in hand, to a flat-topped rock.

In a moment a ghost of a horse cut past him at top speed, but scratching gravel, running low like a clawing cat. With a twitch of his wrists he drove his noose with one hand and tossed the coil of his rope with the other, setting himself, a hundred and eighty pounds, against eleven hundred weight.

The rope came taught like a banjo string, humming, and the short legs of the man plowed two furrows on the gravel slope. The snared horse plunged and pitched, turned and dashed like a furious black bass in green waters. Sport of game fish landing? Cruvan had more activity in seven minutes than a trout catcher would endure in seven years!

When he was through, he had a California sorrel hog-tied and gasping for breath, while he went back to find and shake the sand out of his hat. He went up after his saddle, blanket and bridle, bringing them down the valley, drinking at about every pool, and finding juniper nuts in the pale night, eating them with some impatience, sometimes shucks and all.

By morning he had quite a full stomach, a saddle horse and quite a job before him. True, he considered himself lucky, picking up a maverick like that. Having prepared to his notion, he released his captive, rose with it and was glad the animal chose to travel as well as to buck. He made more miles in the general direction he wanted to go during the next three or four hours than he had during the previous week.

So he arrived in Curtain, a disturbance on the sweep of the alkali, beside the railroad. Curtain consisted of some seventeen newly painted houses, a yellow, red-trimmed station and the other features of a contract-built, company-owned, picked-employé town.

Libra Cruvan rode along the street. He could see the mountains out on the horizon, forty miles distant, and no house along the railroad or the transcontinental highway beside it. He wouldn't have come to Curtain in the first place if he had known exactly where he was. Not that he was lost; he was merely sixty miles farther west than he had figured, not having seen any reliable landmark to judge by.

Hungry, thirsty, dusty, dead tired, he saw a pretty building with large glass windows. On a sign was the word “Café,” so he headed toward it. The place had six tables, five occupied, for the hour was noon. He took his seat among strangers. He was participating in the function of a number of white-collared people, and probably three fair ladies who kept the books and conducted the mechanical details of correspondence for the mine now being worked on an Eastern capital basis.

Cruvan, dashed, put his hands into his pocket and found, all told, two nickles [sic] and five pennies. A terrible, erect young lady in black dress as if she was mourning something, and white collar and cuffs for ornament, came to glare at him.

“Lady,” Cruvan sighed, spreading the coins from his palm and finger tips on that polished surface. “Lady, bring the best, the most grub yo' got for these here seven coins of the realms.”

“Our cheapest dish,” she snipped, “is twenty cents. Sixty cents for regular dinner.”

Cruvan was blue-lipped, pale-cheeked, and kindly eyes would have noticed he was emaciated, that his flanks were caved in, despite the significant odor of cedar which the tiny seeds of juniper had given him.

“Nothing for fifteen cents?” he inquired, looking at the coins.

He glanced up and around, embarrassed, his chin quivering. He saw on all sides the quiet smiles of culture and importance. The fat girl behind the cash register crinkled her cheeks, her eyes bright blue and complacent.

Cruvan's joints creaked as he lifted himself out of the chair, turning to the door. Had one rancher, one fellow rider, a gambler or a desert rat been among the spectators, the man would have been yelled at as an old friend or at least the friend of somebody known to this more fortunate person. As it was they allowed Cruvan to take his departure. He rode the buckskin down the street to the Tunnel Road corner where the trucks went up to the mine, ran into the bank and robbed it on the indignant impulse of the moment.

E JUST walked in and found a smirking fellow waiting for the next higher up to come and spell him for dinner, or rather for the business men's lunch. Instead of a meal release he looked into the awful muzzle of a famous model of revolver. The young man did as ordered, filling a stout pair of money bags with wads of certificates and some coins. Then Curvan [sic] tied the young gentleman up swiftly, gagged him, went out to the street and, as he could ride anything, selected a nice bright red roadster to roll away at fifty miles an hour.

Nobody stopped him. He was even sorry he hadn't gone back after that regular dinner. In the whole town of Curtain, he figured, there wasn't a decent man or charitable woman. He enjoyed thinking what this town of white collars would do with his California buckskin, now that they had him? If he could have had his say, he would have hung around a while, waiting to see how they would handle the animal, or rather the animal handle them. As a matter of fact, they scared it, and two days later a cowboy on the Pipebrand ranch caught the horse, still properly saddled where it had come to drink at the waterhole, forty miles from Curtain.

Cruvan found some nice clothes in suitcases in the car. He found quite a fine lot of canned goods, a self-cooling hamper and other interesting things. An hour later, forty miles distant, he ate at his leisure and wished he'd thought to bring his saddle with him. Anyhow, he had lots of money but nowhere to spend it.

He left the railroad at the first left-hand turn. He left the car with an empty tank a hundred and eighty miles distant that night. He dined at his leisure in Ely, having changed his clothes from boots to hat, and then pulled on a one-piece mechanic's suit, so no one would see what he had on under it.

The Ely paper said that a desperado with terrible features and awful demeanor had terrorized Curtain, held it up, devastated the nervous system of the men of the town, and rode away in Mr. Debeau's automobile. Cruvan grinned. He wasn't much for looks, his face was hard, but only hunger had made him desperate, hunger and fifteen cents.

He picked out and bought a pair of pants, then a nice shirt with the collar hitched to it, and, in the quiet of the American Hotel, changed into reasonable clothes. He shifted into his pockets and two horse-hide money belts, the cash he had acquired. He took a train from those parts, and in Los Angeles settled down to the opportunities there to be had.

Oh, he was bad, all right. He had done considerable mischief in a careless sort of way. At the same time, what made him mad was having fifteen cents and being unable to buy anything to eat with it. In the hectic days, eating on Central Main Street, gambling upstairs here and there, running down to Tia Juana and circling around, Cruvan was still sore to think he had been obliged to rob a bank when he hadn't intended to do such a thing. Really, he hadn't been in a bank-robbing mood, but merely hungry.

One day, when he put his hands into his pockets and drew forth only some two and four bit pieces, and two or three crinkly silver certificates he knew his months of ease had reached an end. He had been pretty lucky, playing cards. Otherwise, long since he must have come to empty pockets. He walked doubtfully along the street. He eyed a number of banks and their branches with speculative interest.

“Hello, Libra!” a voice remarked in his ear, while he felt a familiar grasp on his shoulder, and found his gun taking its departure from under his coat, over his right hip. “Been lookin' for you!”

The buckskin had been noticed and remembered. Nobody knew that particular horse, of course. But the saddle on it meant something. Lots of people knew that saddle, cowmen, riders, liverymen and so on. The descriptions given of Cruvan by the citizens of Curtain were of no use at all. They might just as well have said he was nine feet tall, as what they did say about him. But the saddle betrayed the fact that Libra Cruvan had had it made to order over in Denver in a flush and extravagant pride, some time previous. That was foolish, of course; but every human has a foolish streak in him. The saddler put his mark on the leather and even on the tree and stirrups. That mark was famous, naturally. After the capture of the saddled horse it was only a question of time when they would pick up Libra Cruvan, asking explanations.

So they took Cruvan back, and confronted him with the bank teller, the fat girl from behind the café cash register, the thin, spindly waitress, two of the mine company stenographers and lots of others. Then they put on the stand a cowboy who had picked up the horse with the saddle, and they mentioned the roadster which was found outside of Ely, with proof that Curvan [sic] had come there, abandoning some short pants and long nightshirts which had belonged in the automobile. The proof was a bit absent here and there, but Libra Cruvan's attorney let this go, for he had hopes of being the mine company's attorney and the bank's legal adviser. At that, substantial justice was done, according to the law.

Now in the mountain cañon Libra Cruvan had expiated his hunger and his thirst, his recklessness and his fifteen cents, his seven months jubilee in Los Angeles and Tia Juana. He stood looking at the road his work had built, more than any other man's. The cut-bank was his contribution to automobile tourists. They would ascend it, stop at the summit and stare at the sign, exclaiming to think that they had actually climbed more than two and a half miles above the level of the sea. Some of them would appreciate the fifteen cent origin of this contribution to their safety.

The road opened, too, a beautiful back country to the coming of trucks and settlers, families and ranchers, all kinds of occupiers of the land. Libra Cruvan had plugged steadily. He had hooked out some thousands of tons of sparkling granite, porphyry, sandstone and loose stuff. If that road belonged to any man under heaven, it did to him.

Now and again he had glanced up to where the peaks were silhouetted against the sky. Sometimes he had glanced over his left into the depths, down the slope of which the angular chunks of broken stone sometimes bumped and clattered, smoking where they scraped or struck, exploding where they hit fairly.

He had seen the brilliance of morning whiten into the glare of crystaline midday and, toward the late afternoon, had felt the sting of foreboding wind, while heretofore in visible clouds appeared as pale, rose crystal, deepening to pigeon-blood ruby, speckled with stars of many gem hues, blue, yellow, red, green and the like. He had fed by the thousand meals in the mess tents. He knew the names of each spring where they had pitched the tents of the convict crews, Bide-a-Wee, Don't Hurry, Hang Fast, Pink Posies, Cling Fast and so on up to the We're Here. The water bursting down into the tanks tinkled loudly like bird notes.

Now and again one of the boys couldn't stand the music, and would go daffy. But Deaf Hank would cup his hands over his ears and sit awhile each evening, close up and listening to the sweet sound. That was funny, too, for Deaf was the “blow 'em boy,” handling the explosives with a reckless efficiency that seemed to show he hoped an accident would happen, seeing that he was a lifer.

All this experience and show for fifteen cents! No matter what else No. 11-408 thought about, noticed, did or lived through, he would never forget the two nickels and five copper cents. How come he had saved the pennies he couldn't recall. The nickels were bad enough. Probably as his money got slack, his grip tightened. The memory of the fat girl behind the café cash register was dimmed to a lumpy mess, with a pink and white puff on the top; he would probably recognize the bank cashier, if he happened to see him. The waitress in her gaunt thinness remained a black widow with white collar and cuffs and a crinkly, yellowish, rawhidy neck ascending into an indistinct face.

But even with his eyes- open, he could remember exactly how those coins looked sliding down from his finger tips, three pennies with their faces up, the nickels showing their buffaloes, and the reflections of the edges shining on the polished table surface. Fifteen cents,!

E NEVER did know just how much he carried away from the concrete and plate glass bank, with its new paint smell and shiny brass cage, marble counter and floor. He just hadn't counted the loot, come to think about it. He had enjoyed the money while it lasted. They couldn't take away the good time he had had with it. He lived right well on it. The sons of guns never did get a cent back. That was some satisfaction, considering the fifteen cents scoundrels who'd have a town where they'd let a man go away hungry because he had fifteen cents. Huh!

Nothing to eat for fifteen cents! No. 11-408 was now going down to check out. Good time, among other things, had favored him. Obediently, he clambered into the big supply truck, and went with it up to the summit, where the captain had a word to leave with the road gang. Then they started back down the cut-bank road. The prisoner thrilled as he rolled down over his work, that miles on miles of seven per cent. grade, as specified, surveyed and now an accomplished dugway. He saw, thrilling to every inch of the whole distance.

“All for fifteen cents,” the convict said to himself. “All for fifteen cents. I was hungry. All I wanted was a snack to eat. There wa'n't no place to pay fifteen cents for grub. Huh! 'Twant right.”

He knew, though, while he was digging the rocks out, leveling off the dugway, picking, shoveling, rolling and scraping, his work was making it right. He was there to straighten it all out, that matter of fifteen cents. The idea had been growing on him for years, at first a resentful helplessness as they told him the first time to take a pick and go to it; and then more and more wonderingly and puzzling till now he knew he hadn't quite finished the job. Oh, the dugway was done! The big part of it, his own task was finished, and the others were smoothing it up, prettying it. And yet there was that plaguey fifteen cents, with the cheapest thing to eat at twenty cents!

He was thinking so much about this matter that when they checked him out, took away his No. 11-408 and restored his Libra Cruvan name, he hardly noticed the process at all. He went along the concreted way, saw the gates of heavy bars opening before him. Just so they had opened to let him in. The trusty who threw the lever to clang them shut, separating him from the open roads and the freedom of spirit, now let them swing softly to behind him. Far behind him echoed for the last time the reverberations of that first banging and slamming of ringing metal which celebrated his conversion from Libra Cruvan into No. 11-408. He whispered his name, Libra Cruvan, a personal possession again.

He was alone. He was responsible for himself. No honor code, no state criminal statutes, no sheriff or detective agency or anybody was his boss now, except himself. He had nothing else to think about but the fifteen cents, fifteen cents, two nickels and five pennies which now was his sole incentive. It had become an ambition, a hope and a necessity with him. Around it, he had built up an odd edifice, an imaginary castle so strange that had he mentioned it, any listener must have laughed aloud.

What he needed was the center of the universe. Casting back through his memories, which ranged from Milk River, Montana, to Alma, New Mexico, and from Los Angeles to St. Louis, he reckoned the heart of the world was Red Desert. He headed for that town on the backbone of the United States.

A beautiful place to a free man's eye. Some scores of business places, houses, cabins, shacks and bungalows rested in a saucer-like basin with ridges and ranges fretworking the horizon on every side. Corrals for beef and sheep, horses and auto mobile tourists were there. Highways came meandering down out of the mountains to this common center. A railroad led straight through, out of the due east into the due west, its telegraph poles standing black, somehow, against the skyline as one approached from north or south, since it followed a kind of natural fill.

Libra Cruvan entered Red Desert. He had a bag with some duffle in it. He wore a hat which had been rolled up more than ten years. He was in clothes difficult to classify. He followed Sage Brush Street up from the railroad to the corner of Concrete Boulevard and cut across to the big bank on the corner.

As he entered, the man in the cage on the lopped off corner glanced at him, blinked and wet his lips nervously.

“Where's Packy?” Cruvan asked, ignoring the evidences of recognition.

“In there!” The teller jerked his head toward the president's office.

Cruvan found the door ajar and walked in. Three men were sitting in discussion. They all glanced at the intruder, and one sprang back, throwing up his hands, exclaiming—

“My God!”

“Why, howdy, Cruvan!” another cried, springing up. “Darn glad to see you. How's things?”

“All right,” Cruvan replied, rolling his eyes at the excited man.

“Old friend of mine!” the bank president introduced. “Darbing of the Curtain State Bank.”

“Yuh, I know!” Cruvan grunted, one corner of his lip lifting at sight of a man so afraid.

“That's right, you do!” Packy chuckled. “Well, old boy, what you going to do now? What can I do to help? Want a job on my ranch?”

“I want to open a café,” Cruvan replied. “Right here in Red Desert.”

“Yes? Good idea. We've a swell restaurant. No lunch room, though we need one. Around the corner behind the bank's a good tight building. You can have that”

“Why, Mr. Delvane he's just out of—” Darbing interrupted.

“Look here,” Packy turned on him angrily. “I've known Libra Cruvan twenty-five years. Rode range with him.”

“But he held up our bank.”

“What made you do it, Cruvan?” Packy turned to the grim visitor.

“Hungry.”

“I thought so. Come on out, and I'll introduce you to Mr. Cresker.”

Cresker was the man behind the wicker fence, who knew Cruvan well enough, but not in the way he now was made acquainted with him.

“Make out a book for one thousand dollars for him,” Packy ordered, drawing a counter check on his own account to cover the loan to ex-No. 11-408, alias Libra Cruvan.

Cruvan for a while stood silent, blinking at the floor. He reached his hand then to shake the hand of his friend, turning and plunging out into the street immediately afterwards. He walked five miles into the open sage, returning after a time to ransack Red Desert for things he needed, hardware, drygoods, grocery and junk dealers.

OR years he had listed and revised his estimates and ideas. He knew what he must have. He sought nothing else. He worked all that night. The following morning but one, a sign in black, red and white thrust out over the sidewalk on Sage Brush Street, just behind the bank.

Three small tables, a high lunch counter with chairs and stools to match, set off copper boilers, a fine range, shelves full of dishes and sundries as table ware and a large refrigerator.

A burly, white-aproned, hard-faced man gave a look around as he stood with his big, stubby-fingered hands on the counter. He sniffed the aroma of coffee ready and the stove hot. Then he went to the front door, unlocked it and unhooked the copper screen door beyond. He backed away as his eyes turned to one side, toward the floor. High hopes were in this enterprise. Libra Cruvan had not always realized his most modest anticipations. Now he wondered with sinking heart.

But the next instant a cowboy drifted around the corner, came in and ordered a cup of coffee with a piece of apple pie. A minute later another man, a taxi chauffeur, came in. Then two strangers sat at a table, and the face of Libra Cruvan began to glow and sweat.

A two-handed worker, able to pick and shovel right or left, he was a bit awkward. He had the knack, though. In his day he had cooked, waited and done many campfire and kitchen range kinds of professional things. Besides, his heart was in it. Steaks, beans, roasts, sandwiches, hamburgers and sausages were called for. He handled them all. He did not know, when Packy came sauntering in, that the banker had sent an edict up and down Concrete Boulevard that he expected his friends to do their duty by the new enterprise around the corner, until the business was established. Then having seen the cook well engaged, he himself sauntered in after the casual manner of a preoccupied man.

The bill of fare was simple. At the head was printed—

“I'll start with the soup,” Packy ordered absently.

Cruvan dropped his hands on the counter, staring. It happened the banker was the first man to order this most conspicuous dish. For only a moment the café keeper lost the thread of his occupation, and then he reached under the counter and drew out a new sixteen inch tray. He pulled a loaf of dry Vienna bread out of a large basket. He put a two-quart bowl on the tray beside the loaf and turned to a sizzling kettle at the back of the range by the pipe. With a ladle he nearly filled the bowl with cut-up vegetables, two-inch cubes of meat and thick broth. He carried the tray around to the table, with a glass of water, soup spoon, knife and fork. And thus he served the visitor, with no sign of recognition.

The banker leaned back, the better to survey the size of this outlay. He glanced at the instantly retreating shoulders of the man he was backing, made as if to say something, but didn't. Instead he ate. A large, hungry, large-capacity man, Packy Delvan was just able to find the bottom of the bowl, though he left over some of the crusty bread.

He paid the fifteen cents, remarking:

“I believe I said I'd begin on the soup, Cruvan.”

“Reckon that's so,” Cruvan replied.

“Well, I ended on it, too.”

Cruvan blinked, grinned and then jerked about to—well, tend to something.

In a way, this ended the matter. In an other aspect, the new era of Libra Cruvan had begun. One day the soup was beef, another mutton, and again it was a Mulligan, an Irish, or a Fill Up stew or the like. Yet every day the head of Cruvan's Good Café Grub menu read to the music of that old refrain, a fifteen cent meal.

Even though down the list of entrées after a time, one found lamb chops, T-bones, porterhouse and tenderloins of sundry meat animals, and when the café was serving all the fancy relishes, fruits and sundries, its fame carried east and west by tourists, when the little old store was replaced by a regular full-size restaurant, with music and even Saturday night dances up and down the wide aisles, the first dish, if one called for it, would also be one's last, unless he specifically demanded a “plate” course.

One other thing about this particular bid for the patronage of a customer. Sometimes a dusty youth would come slinking in, even through the back door appealing to the help. Or a cowman would seek a secluded place, and places out of sight were always ready even in the big noon hour for the entertainment of these nervous, diffident patrons. If they had fifteen cents, that was all right. But if, as occasionally happened, some one came and asked a whispering, shamed question, “What have you for seven or 'leven cents,” these inquirers found the menu price list deceiving. The fifteen-cent soup on bid of a nickel and two pennies came just the same, and the slim young woman behind the cash register would push back the two cents as change. She even did that one day for Packy himself, when he found he didn't have his pocketbook in the clothes he was wearing.

Notice, though, the cash register girl was slim. Cruvan could stand a lot, for he came of an enduring school, only he could never forget that lumpy, dumpling girl who had laughed at him at Curtain those years before. He tried not to have too thin waitresses, either. They never were dressed in mourning.

Also, only one dish on the list sold for fifteen cents. Cruvan had to print it there once. True, it hurt him. As a memory, nothing else was bitter like that figure. Not but what he was glad to have the wonderful privilege of giving a full to overflowing meal thus to whoever came; only he could never forget—was in a measure proud to remember—he had built a dug-way road for fifteen cents.