The Spook Hills Mystery/Chapter 3

It took Shelton C. Sherman a week or so to get used to Sunbeam ways, and to Burney, and to the blunt "joshing" of the cow-punchers who called Burney their boss. He learned to accept their sudden disappearances and their unexplained absences and their unexpected arrivals as the routine of a cattle ranch. He learned also to accept Burney as a reality, and gave over the fantastic idea that he was part of some fairy tale projected into the sage country. He learned to answer when some one shouted for "Shep"—for that was the way they twisted his self-confessed nickname of Shelt.

He learned that he must not believe all that they told him, however serious might be their tones and their countenances. He learned to look for an eyelid lowered slyly and to recognize that particular muscular contraction as a warning signal, and to doubt whatever assertion the winker might make thereafter. He learned a good many things, as a matter of fact. And since he was young and of a cheerful temperament and much given to fun, he learned faster than one might suppose. In a week he acquired a doubtful smile and a look of inquiry; in two weeks he had forsworn all faith in his fellows and refused to believe anything he was told; which piece of radicalism was almost as bad in its way as was his too-confiding tendency.

Burney drove the first nail into the coffin of his faith, and he did it the first forenoon of Shelton's sojourn at the Sunbeam. He found Shelton hanging blankets and quilts on the sagging barbed-wire fence that inclosed the grave of some gardener's hopes. He stood and watched Shelton examine a calico-covered pillow, and finally he asked what was wrong with it.

"Why, you see," said Shelton cheerfully, "the fellows seemed to think the bedding hadn't been thoroughly cleaned after that man committed suicide in them, so I thought it might not be healthy to sleep in them without a good airing. They told me it was on this pillow he blew out his brains"

"They lied to you," Burney said flatly. "Nobody ever died on this ranch yet."

Shelton dropped the pillow, and stared at the giant. "Oh, they lied to me!" he repeated disappointedly. "I don't see why they'd want to do that—do you?" He looked undecidedly at the flapping blankets, and began to pull them off the fence. "I suppose they'd think it a great joke if they saw all this bedding outside," he explained. "I guess I'd better put it back on the bed and wait for the next move. It wouldn't do to say I'd found out, would it?" He stopped, and faced Burney, his candid blue eyes looking up at the big man. "I wonder if they did it to scare me?"

"Chances are," said Burney dispassionately, and went on to the cabin.

After that faith died quickly. Shelton came to that mental attitude of general distrust which demands absolute proof before he would accept anything as fact.

You can see how that would work out in a country where everything was strange and where ignorance must perforce be warned of many things by experience or suffer the penalty.

"What are those hills over there called?" he asked Burney guilefully one day, and pointed toward the east.

"Them?" Burney turned his head slowly toward the high, broken ridge standing stark -and barren against the sky. "Them's the Piute Hills over there."

"The fellows call them the Spook Hills," said Shelton in the tone of one who has once again suffered disillusionment.

"They may call 'em that," said Burney, "but that ain't saying it's their name."

"Spooky says he saw a ghost over there."

"Ed's always seein' things."

"I'd like to ride over there, if you don't want me for anything." Shelton was beginning to find little duties around the place, so that he felt that he was not altogether his own master. "Could I take old Dutch and a lunch and do a little exploring to-day?"

"There ain't nothing over there," Burney said, with a shade too much of emphasis. "Better ride over to the river if you want to go somewhere."

"I'd rather go to those hills, if it's all the same to you. I've heard so much about them"

"You'd git lost," Burney scowled down at him.

"Oh, no, I won't. I've got a compass." And Shelton produced a compass the size of a dollar watch, and dangled it by its buckskin string before Burney. "Ought I to take water along, or are there streams and springs?" He was smiling in anticipation of the exporters thrills, until he tilted back his head and looked up into Burney's face; the smile gave place then to plain puzzlement. "Why don't you want me to go?" he asked straightforwardly, like a child. "Don't you want me to use old Dutch? You told me I could ride him whenever I wanted to, so I took it for granted—"

"I don't care how much you ride him." Burney was plainly ill at ease.

"Then why don't you want"

"Oh, I don't care. Go where you want to. Only—there ain't anything to see." He pulled out his pipe and began to fill it nervously.

"Maybe I'll see Spooky's ghost," laughed Shelton, and stopped short when he looked up at Burney.

"Ed's a fool. They ain't any such thing." Burney spilled tobacco into the wrinkles of his ill-fitting vest.

"Well, I can go, can't I?" Shelton did not attempt to understand this big man. He looked so different from other men that one would not expect him to act like others, he reflected. In the week of their acquaintance he had observed many peculiar traits in Burney. He slept sometimes for hours during the middle of the day for one thing. And he had long fits of silence that were almost sullen, and was sometimes querulous afterward with the men, so that they avoided him quite openly as the simplest means of dodging trouble. Shelton thought that Burney was in one of his unpleasant moods this morning.

"You can do as yuh please, I reckon" And Burney spoke even that qualified consent grudgingly.

So Shelton took long steps to the stable, having spied Spooky there. He wanted Spooky to help him get the saddle and bridle on Dutch—the proper tying of a latigo being still a baffling mystery to him; also, he could not, for the life of him, tell which was the front of the bridle.

He went grinning up to Spooky, and clapped that individual on the shoulder. "I'm going spook hunting," he announced gleefully. "Want to go along?"

"No, I don't want to go along," Spooky retorted, mimicking Shelton's tone. "Spooks don't travel by daylight, Shep. Better wait till toward night."

"I'm going to stay till night," Shelton told him calmly. "I'll take a lunch along. And I've got a compass, and I can travel by the North Star."

"You'll want to travel by lightning if you hear that thing that I heard," Spooky fleered. "Wait till you git out there in them lava hills and it commences to git darkish! Honest to gollies, Shep, they is something out in them hills! I wasn't lying to yuh about that. They's three of us now that's saw it and heard it. It ain't human, and it ain't no animal. It—say, I'll bet four bits you'll come home scairt plumb simple—if yuh come. You wouldn't git me out there after sundown—not fer this hull outfit."

"Say, that sounds interesting!" Shelton declared, trying to put the chin strap over old Dutch's nose, and wondering what was the matter. "I'll have something to write home to the folks about. Whoa, old boy! Open your mouth like a good sport."

Spooky came up and took the bridle away from Shelton with an air of weary tolerance. "Chances are we'll do the writin' home to your folks, if yuh go prognosticatin' around over in them breaks," he predicted ominously. "Yuh better keep away from there—that's straight goods, Shep," he added seriously. "On the dead, it ain't no place for a man to go prowling around alone unless he has to."

"That's the kind of place little me has been looking for. I'm tired to death of nice safe places that you can pet. I came out here to be real wild and woolly, and Spook Hills keep a calling, and it's there that I would be—hunting ghosts that scare our Spooky soon as it's too dark to see!" He sang the paraphrase, and, like the cheerful young reprobate he was, he went blandly around to the "Injun side" of Dutch and would have climbed into the saddle if Spooky had not grabbed him by the coat and pulled him back.

"Learn to git onto a horse right, why don't yuh?" Spooky protested disgustedly. "Don't go and insult pore old Dutch by mountin' like a squaw."

Spooky watched him go bobbing up the hill and out of sight over the rim, and his eyes were friendly while he made disparaging remarks about the departing one. He liked Shelton C. Sherman with a patronizing, tolerant kind of affection, even though he did lie to him and tease him and bully him.

Shelton went joyously on his way through pungent sage and over hot, barren spaces where was nothing alive except the lizards.. Spooky had been human enough to give Shelton C. some really good advice about riding alone. Part of it was to let Dutch use his own judgment and take his own pace in rough country; for Dutch had grown old in the sagebrush, and he was wise with the wisdom of range cayuses. Therefore, having headed for Spook Hills, he left the rest to Dutch and the god Chance, and rode with his mind at ease.

Barrenness he found, and heat and desolation; and a certain eerie grandeur such as he had never dreamed the land could compass. He did not find anything ghostly about the place, however, and he was disappointed at the prospect of an uneventful day in a wilderness where the stage was set for bold adventure. He was hot, and the canteen he carried dried on the outside and let the water turn sickeningly warm. He did not feel like eating the coarse sandwiches of sour-dough bread and cold bacon, and there did not seem to be any place where he could make Dutch comfortable while he rested in the shade of a black ledge.

He shot a jack rabbit at forty paces with his nice, new thirty-eight revolver, and was astonished to find himself spread-eagling into a sandy space between two thick clumps of sage. It had never occurred to Shelton that Dutch might object to the sudden report of a gun discharged behind his ears—the rabbit had been running before them when Shelton fired.

Shelton got up and dug sand out of his collar, and picked up his hat and laughed at the joke of it. After that he led Dutch to where the rabbit lay kicking in the hot sand. It cried like a frightened baby when he drew near, and Shelton almost cried himself with the pity of it. A shoulder was broken, and the heart of it thumped so hard that its whole body vibrated with the beating; and when Shelton picked it up and stroked it as one strokes the back of a kitten, its eyes fairly popped with fear. He spent ten minutes in bandaging the shoulder with his neck-tie, and while he worked he talked soothingly to the terrified little animal. He did not want to leave it there in the desert to die, and he could not bear to kill it. He held it in the crook of one arm while he mounted awkwardly and rode on, wondering if he could find a cool, shady little nook where it could stay until its shoulder healed.

After a long while he thought he heard some one shooting, and he turned that way. Not the vicious crack of a large-calibered gun, but the pop of a twenty-two, he thought it was.

Presently he came out from a huddle of great, black bowlders and heard the rifle crack just beyond the next rock huddle. He rode that way, and he came upon a girl sitting at ease upon a flat rock that was shaded by the ledge at her back, staring across a narrow gulch that was a mere rocky gash in the hill. While he stared also she lifted her small rifle aimed carefully with her elbow resting upon a convenient protuberance in the ledge, and fired. She lowered the rifle, and peered sharply, aimed and fired again. Shelton looked, but he couldn't, for the life of him, see what she could be shooting at.

Dutch snorted and backed, and the girl glanced that way and saw Shelton staring curiously, the wounded rabbit held close under one arm.

"Hello!" she said, and turned her attention again to the gulch.

Shelton got out of the saddle without spilling the rabbit, dropped the reins to the ground as Spooky had told him he must do, and came forward with his best making-friends manner. Secretly he was a bit disappointed in the girl because she was not beautiful. You see, he had read a lot of Western stories, and he had become infected with the idea that all range-bred girls are lovely—real, love-story heroines waiting to be discovered.

This one was not true to type—granting that the story girls are typical. Her hair was a sunburned brown, and there was nothing lustrous or sheeny about it—the desert winds saw to that. It seemed abundant enough, and all native to her own head. She had it braided and hanging down her back with the end of the braid merging into two wind-roughened curls. There was no ribbon bow at all, by the way, but a twist or two of what looked suspiciously like common grocery twine. She wore an old felt hat that looked as though it had seen hard usage, and a faded calico shirt waist and skirt of brown denim. Her face was sunburned with a tendency toward peeling, and her hands were brown and rough. For the rest, her eyes were a clear blue-gray that changed color with her moods and the light. Her mouth could not be spoiled by a harsh climate and primitive living, so that it was nice also; red and well shaped, and flexible, and curving easily into a smile.

"How-de-do? What you shooting at?" Shelton began ingratiatingly, smiling down at her while the hot breeze fanned the moist hair off his forehead.

"Rattlesnakes. Put on your hat; you want to get sunstruck?" The girl glanced briefly at him again, then aimed and fired across the gulch.

"Oh, say! Are you really shooting rattlesnakes? My name is Sherman. I'm staying at the Sunbeam Ranch. You don't mind if I stop a few minutes, do you? It's horribly lonesome in these hills."

"Don't I know that?" The girl moved aside to make room for him in the shade, and Shelton accepted the mute invitation and sat down beside her. "I guess I know more about lonesomeness than you do, Mr. Sherman. I'm tickled to death to see somebody that don't smell of sheep."

Shelton turned and looked at her as long as he dared. "That's awfully good of you," he murmured in his week-end tone.

"No, it ain't. It's just human of me. I live right in the middle of 'em. I hear sheep, and smell sheep, and see sheep twenty-four hours a day, except when I saddle up and get out like this for a while—and then the emptiness is just as bad." Her mouth drooped a little. "I go back to the wagon at night tickled to hear the sheep blatting and the dogs yelping—just because they're something alive."

"I didn't know there was a sheep ranch so close," Shelton said, by way of keeping the conversation running along smoothly. "Though I've heard the fellows at the Sunbeam talking about some sheep."

"There isn't any ranch," the girl told him drearily. "I could stand that because I'd have a cabin of some kind to take care of. I live in a sheep wagon with poppy and Uncle Jake. I do the cooking, and that's all there is to do. You can't," she observed dispiritedly, "do much housekeeping in a sheep wagon."

Shelton had learned in the past week to conceal his ignorance, if possible. So now he merely shook his head and said it did seem rather discouraging to try—though he had not the faintest idea of what a sheep wagon looked like.

"There's another snake!" she announced suddenly, and lifted her little rifle. "There must be a regular den over there. I've seen six already—I got four, I think." She fired, and a tiny plop of rock dust told where the bullet had struck. "Missed," she said uninterestedly.

"Where is he? I'll have a whack at him myself." Shelton laid down the rabbit, which was too paralyzed with fear to move. "I haven't practiced any since I came to the ranch," he explained apologetically. "I've always heard what fine shots the cowboys are, and I didn't want them laughing at me. But"

"But my sample of shooting encourages you to go ahead," finished the girl laconically. "Cowboys don't shoot any better than anybody else," she went on, in the tone of an iconoclast. "It's just the name of it they've got. Why don't you shoot? Can't you see the snake on that ledge just under where I hit? Looks like a crooked stick—there! Now when he quits crawling you shoot at his head." She gave a dry little laugh. "You needn't be afraid to shoot before anybody if you can take his head off from here with that gun."

"Oh, say!" Shelton waited long enough to hug himself farcically. "This is going to be real wild-West sport! Gee! Shooting rattlesnakes in their dens"

"Well, shoot first and talk about it afterward," advised the girl bluntly. "He'll crawl out of sight in a minute."

Shelton obediently raised his revolver high, brought it down in line, and fired—while the girl watched him curiously now that his attention was diverted from herself. Thus she did not see whether he hit the snake or not, and was startled at the whoop he gave.

"Say, I'm the lucky child! Did you see him wriggle? Stirred up the whole family, too! Gee, look at 'em!"

Now, this is not going to be a snake story. I shall not say how many rattlers those two killed in that gulch, while they sat there in the shade and talked and watched and fired when a snake showed itself. The point is that they became very well acquainted before the girl got stiffly to her feet and said she must go, or poppy would wonder where his supper was coming from.

Shelton, having learned that one pinched the rattles off the snakes one killed and kept them for souvenirs—and for proof of the killing—insisted upon climbing down into the gulch and collecting all he could find. The girl—who finally confessed to the name of Vida, and explained that her mother had gotten it out of the dictionary because it was odd and the feminine of David, and because her mother's father was named David and ought to have a grandchild named after him, anyway—Vida protested and pointed out the danger in vain. Shelton must have rattlers to send to "the folks" at home, to prove the snake story he meant to write. As to the danger—ignorance is frequently mistaken for courage, and he went in spite of her arguments; in spite of her commands, even. And by all the laws of nature he thereby took a long step toward winning her regard. He came back with his nose turned up at the unpleasantness, and with a handful of rattles—no, I shall not say how many—which he insisted upon dividing with her.

He also gave her the wounded rabbit to keep, though she assured him pessimistically that the dogs would kill it first chance they got, and that if they didn't, it would die of the broken shoulder. Womanlike, she was inconsistent enough to carry it home with her in spite of her pessimism, just because he gave it to her, perhaps.

Shelton tried to induce her to promise that she would come again to hunt rattlesnakes on some certain day, and failed. And when they had parted and he was riding home in the early dusk, it occurred to him that he had forgotten all about the spook. It would have been a good story to tell Vida—only they had plenty to talk about without that. He remembered then that she had once spoken of the place as Piute Hills, so she couldn't have heard the spook story. He would tell her next time, sure. He knew she was not the kind of person who believes in ghosts, so it would not scare her. Then he sighed. She seemed to be an awfully nice girl, but it did seem a shame that she was not pretty. Her plainness was the one jarring note in the day's pleasure, and robbed him of the joy of romantic musings as he rode homeward.