CHAPTER II—Charmed Lives

       Table of Contents

      THE spell of restraint that resulted from Buck Ashley’s story was at last broken by the cowboy, Jack Rover.

      “Look here, Dick,” he exclaimed, “I’ll give a month’s salary if you will let me take a chance and follow old Guadalupe. I’ve simply got to find out and locate that sand-bar in some mountain stream from which she brings in all this gold. This is the third time I’ve seen our friend Buck Ashley collect a grocery bill from the old squaw, and the whole business, gold nuggets and all, is getting on my nerves. Why, I dreamed about it for a week last time I saw her forking out whole handfuls of gold.”

      “Very well,” replied Willoughby, “if you want to take the chance, Jack, go ahead. But it is a mad project which will end in my expressing your remains back East or else planting you in the cemetery on the hill. It’s up to you to make your choice before you tackle the job. You certainly know what happened to four or five others who attempted to follow the old squaw. Each mother’s son of them was buried the next day.”

      “Oh, that’s ancient history,” Jack retorted.

      “Not such very ancient hist’ry,” remarked Tom Baker. “I myself saw young Bill McNab drilled through the heart with a bullet that seemed to come from nowhere. After that I’ll allow I wasn’t filled up with too much curiosity as to where Guadalupe hiked over the mountains.”

      “There was a regular sharp-shootin’ outfit,” concurred Buck Ashley.

      “And there wasn’t a sheriff in the country would have led a posse into that damned ambush,” Tom went on. “There wasn’t a sportin’ chance along that narrow ledge round which Guadalupe always disappeared. And with all them outlaws in the mountains!”

      “But the outlaws have been wiped out years ago,” persisted Jack Rover.

      “Mebbe,” said Tom Baker, sententiously.

      “You forget the White Wolf,” added Buck Ashley.

      “Which white wolf?” asked Jack. “I put that question before but got no answer.”

      “Both,” replied Tom. “To begin with I don’t believe that Don Manuel is dead at all. That was only a newspaper story. You may take it from me that the bandit won’t pass in his checks till he gets old Ben Thurston. I’m allowin’ as how Ben Thurston would quick enough give a thousand head of his fattest beeves just to rest easy in his mind on that score. He’ll find out, sure enough, some day.”

      “Yes, when the White Wolf finds him,” interjected the storekeeper with a terse emphasis.

      “What’s that old feud anyway?” queried Lieutenant Munson. “Tell me, Tom.”

      “Oh, it is an old story,” the sheriff answered. “I thought everybody knew about it, but of course you’re a newcomer. Well, you see,” he continued, clearing his throat and expectorating a copious and accurately aimed pit-tew of tobacco juice toward a knot-hole in the floor, “the White Wolf’s father, Don Antonio de Valencia, a reg’lar high-toned grandee from Spain, had settled in these here parts away back longer than anyone could remember. He claimed this whole stretch of country from horizon to horizon. Then came the Americans, among them a government surveyor named Thurston. He had a pull at Washington and managed to get a legal grant to the San Antonio property. Of course the old Spaniard had no real title—his was just a sort of squatter’s claim. But they do say as how he had lived in this here valley more than half a century, so it was mighty hard luck to lose the land. And the boy Manuel never would admit the Thurstons had any right to call it theirs.”

      “Don Manuel had a younger sister,” interposed Buck Ashley. “Rosetta, a beautiful girl—looked like a morning-glory. Gad! but she sure had a purty face. You remember, Tom, don’t you?”

      “Oh, yes,” replied Tom Baker, “it’s not likely I should forget the poor girl. It was ‘cause of her the quarrel became a bitter blood feud—the Vendetta of the Hills, as we got to calling it. You see,” he went on, resuming the thread of his story, “old man Thurston’s son, Ben, the present owner of the rancho, was in his younger days a gay Lothario scamp, and he came from the East to his new home in California loaded down with a college education and a mighty intimate knowledge of the ways of the world that decent folks don’t talk about, much less practice. He had not been here a month until he commenced makin’ love to little Senorita Rosetta. Before the second sheep-shearin’ time came around, she was—well, in a delicate condition. To save himself and, as he thought, cover up the disgrace—you see he was engaged to a rich Eastern girl of prominent family—why, the young scoundrel conceived the hellish plot of lurin’ little Rosetta to Comanche Point one dark night. And when he got her there he threw her over the cliff—at least that’s the way the story goes. Guess Don Manuel was about twenty-five years old at that time, and Ben Thurston two or three years his junior. Well, the disgrace killed Rosetta’s father and mother. They died of grief and shame soon after the affair, almost on the same day, and Don Manuel buried them together in the old churchyard on the hill by the side of his murdered sister. And it was there and then, they say, that he took an oath to kill Ben Thurston. That was mor’n thirty years ago and the feud has been on ever since, and all us old-timers know hell will be poppin’ ’round here one of these days.”

      “But nobody ever sees the White Wolf, Don Manuel,” added Buck Ashley. “That’s the ex-tr’ornery part of it.”

      “Oh, you yourself are likely to see him one of these dark nights, Buck,” laughed Jack Rover, as he winked at the other boys. “A storekeeper that’ll work night and day stacking up money year in and year out is liable to have a call sooner or later from the bandit and his friends.”

      “Oh, hell!” was the laconic response of Buck Ashley. “Guess I sure can take care of myself.”

      “But Don Manuel may not be alive,” suggested the young lieutenant.

      “He’s alive right enough, make no mistake,” said Tom Baker, “although I’ll allow I don’t know a single soul who has actually seen him personally for more’n twenty years. He is a kind o’ shadowy cuss. Everybody knows him by his old-time deeds of high-way robbin’ and all-round murderin’ for golden loot. I heard of a feller last year who claims to have seen the White Wolf when he was makin’ that last big stage delivery over by Tulare Lake. He was masked, and had all the passengers out on the roadside with their hands thrown up over their heads while he was takin’ their valuables away from them.”

      “It’s a dead cinch,” Buck Ashley observed, “that whenever there was a hold-up or a robbery, or a murder in cold blood for money, why everybody knew that the White Wolf was again in the hills and playin’ his cut-throat game for pelf and plunder, or mebbe just for revenge against the gringos, whom he hated like hell. Sometimes he was not heard of in these parts for two or three years, and then he showed up more blood-thirsty than ever. His hand was agin every man, and it looked like as every man’s hand was agin him.”

      “I’ve been told,” said Dick Willoughby, “that when the White Wolf was a boy he saved the life of the old highwayman, Joaquin Murietta.”

      “Yes, them are facts,” replied Tom Baker. “Leastways I’ve heard say so. They claim that he saved Murietta’s life from a posse of deputies one night, and altho’ the White Wolf was only a boy at that time, yet a heap of people think he’s the only livin’ soul who knows the whereabouts and location of the secret cavern where Joaquin Murietta planted his loot, amountin’, they say, to millions of dollars in gold and jewels and valuables of all kinds. The retreat always proved a safe one for the murderin’ gang, and now they’re gone no one even to this day can find the place. It’s somewhere on San Antonio Rancho, but where? The White Wolf kept his secret well.”