II
Thus was the trade effected with much speed and few preliminaries, because Bill knew Casey Ryan very intimately and had seen him in action when his temper was up. Bill adjusted an extra horn which he happened to have in stock. One of those terrific things that go far toward making the life of a pedestrian a nerve-racking succession of startles. Casey tried it out on himself before he would accept it. He walked several doors down the street with the understanding that Bill would honk at him when he was some little distance away. Bill waited until Casey’s attention was drawn to a lady with thick ankles who was crossing the street in a hurry and a stiff breeze. Bill came down on the metal plunger of the horn with all his might, and Casey jumped perceptibly and came back grinning.
“She’ll do. What’ll put a crimp in Casey Ryan’s spine is good enough for anybody. Bring her out here and show me how yuh work the damn thing. Guess she’ll hold six Bohunks, won’t she—with sideboards on? I’ll run ‘er around a coupla times b’fore I start out—and that’s all I will do.”
Naturally the garage man was somewhat perturbed at this nonchalant manner of getting acquainted with a Ford. He knew the road from Lund to Pinnacle. He had driven it himself, with a conscious sigh of relief when he had safely negotiated the last hair-pin curve; and Bill was counted a good driver. He suggested an insurance policy to Casey, not half so jokingly as he tried to sound.
Casey turned and gave him a pale blue, unwinking stare. “Say! Never you mind gettin’ out insurance on this auty-mo-bile. What you wanta do is insure the cars that’s liable to meet up with me in the trail.”
Bill saw the sense of that, too, and said no more about insuring Casey. He drove down the canyon where the road is walled in on both sides by cliffs, and proceeded to give Casey a lesson in driving. Casey did not think that he needed to be taught how to drive. All he wanted to know, he said, was how to stop ‘er and how to start ‘er. Bill needn’t worry about the rest of it.
“She’s darn tender-bitted,” he commented, after two round trips over the straight half-mile stretch,—and fourteen narrow escapes. “And the man that made ‘er sure oughta known better than to make ‘er neck rein in harness. And I don’t like this windin’ ‘er up every time you wanta start. But she can sure go—and that’s what Casey Ryan’s after every day in the week.
“All right, Bill. I’ll go gather up the Bohunks and start. You better ‘phone up to Pinnacle that Casey’s on the road—and tell ‘em he says it’s his road’s long’s he’s on it. They’ll know what I mean.”
Pinnacle did know, and waited on the sidewalk that afforded a view of the long hill where the road curled down around the head of the gulch and into town. Much sooner than his most optimistic backers had a right to expect—for there were bets laid on the outcome there in Pinnacle—on the brow of the hill a swirl of red dust grew rapidly to a cloud. Like a desert whirlwind it swept down the road, crossed the narrow bridge over the deep cut at the head of the gulch where the famous Youbet mine belched black smoke, and rolled on down the steep, narrow little street.
Out of the whirlwind poked the pugnacious little brass-rimmed nose of a new Ford, and behind the windshield Casey Ryan grinned widely as he swung up to the postoffice and stopped as he had always stopped his four-horse stage,—with a flourish. Stopping with a flourish is fine and spectacular when you are driving horses accustomed to that method and on the lookout for it. Horses have a way of stiffening their forelegs and sliding their hind feet and giving a lot of dramatic finish to the performance. But there is no dramatic sense at all in the tin brain of a Ford. It just stopped. And the insecure fourth Bohunk in the tonneau went hurtling forward into the front seat straight on his way through the windshield. Casey threw up an elbow instinctively and caught him in the collar button and so avoided breakage and blood spattered around. Three other foreigners were scrambling to get out when Casey stopped them with a yell that froze them quiet where they were.
“Hey! You stay right where y’are! I gotta deliver yuh up to the Bluebird in a minute.”
There were chatterings and gesticulations in the tonneau. Out of the gabble a shrill voice rose be-seechingly in English. “We will walk, meester’. If you pleese, meester! We are ‘fraid for ride wit’ dees may_chine_, meester!”
Casey was nettled by the cackling and the thigh-slapping of the audience on the sidewalk. He reached for his stage whip, and missing it used his ready Irish fists. So the Bohunks crawled unhappily back into the car and subsided shivering and with tears in their eyes.
“Dammit, when I take on passengers to ride, they’re goin’ to ride till they git there. You shut up, back there!”
A friend of Casey’s stepped forward and cranked the machine, and Casey pulled down the gas lever until the motor howled, turned in the shortest possible radius and went lunging up the crooked steep trail to the Bluebird mine on top of the hill, his engine racing and screaming in low.
Thereafter Pinnacle and Lund had a new standard by which to measure the courage of a man. Had he made the trip with Casey Ryan and his new Ford? He had? By golly, he sure had nerve. One man passed the peak for sheer bravery and rode twice with Casey, but certain others were inclined to disparage the feat, on the ground that on the second trip he was drunk.
Casey did not like that. He admitted that he was a hard driver; he had always been proud because men called him the hardest driver in the West. But he argued that he was also a safe driver, and that they had no business to make such a fuss over riding with him. Didn’t he ride after his own driving every day of his life? Had he ever got killed? Had he ever killed anybody else? Well! What were they all yawping about, then? Pinnacle and Lund made him tired.
“If you fellers think I can’t bounce that there tin can down the road fast as any man in the country, why don’t yuh pass me on the road? You’re welcome. Just try it.”
No one cared to try, however. Meeting him was sufficiently hazardous. There were those who secretly timed their traveling so that they would not see Casey Ryan at all, and I don’t think you can really call them cowards, either. A good many had families, you know.
Casey had an accident now and then; and his tire expense was such as to keep him up nights playing poker for money to support his Ford. You simply can’t whirl into town at a thirty-mile gait—I am speaking now of Pinnacle, whose street was a gravelly creek bed quite dry and ridgy between rains—and stop in twice the car’s length without scouring more rubber off your tires than a capacity load of passengers will pay for. Besides, you run short of passengers if you persist in doing it. Even the strangers who came in on the Salt Lake line were quite likely to look once at the cute little narrow-gauge train with its cunning little day coach hitched behind a string of ore cars, glance at Casey’s Ford stage with indifference and climb into the cunning day coach for the trip to Pinnacle. The psychology of it passed quite over Casey’s head, but his pocket felt the change.
In two weeks—perhaps it was less, though I want to be perfectly just— Casey was back, afoot and standing bow-legged in the doorway of Bill Master’s garage at Lund.
“Gimme another one of them Ford auty-mo-biles,” he requested, grinning a little. “I guess mebby I oughta take two or three—but I’m a little short right now, Bill. I ain’t been gitting any good luck at poker, lately.”
Bill asked a question or two while he led Casey to the latest model of Fords, just in from the factory.
Casey took
