Casey Ryan by B. M. Bower
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B. M. Bower >> Casey Ryan
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14 CASEY RYAN
BY
B. M. BOWER
Author of "Chip of the Flying U", "Rim O' the World", "Cow-Country", etc.
1921
[Illustration: Casey reached for his pocket, and the white man also
reached for his. FRONTISPIECE. _See page_ 237.]
CHAPTER I
From Denver to Spokane, from El Paso to Fort Benton, men talk of Casey
Ryan and smile when they speak his name. Old men with the flat tone of
coming senility in their voices will suck at their pipes and cackle
reminiscently while they tell you of Casey's tumultuous youth--when he
drove the six fastest horses in Colorado on the stage out from Cripple
Creek, and whooped past would-be holdups with a grin of derision on his
face and bullets whining after him and passengers praying disjointed
prayers and clinging white-knuckled to the seats.
They say that once a flat, lanky man climbed bareheaded out at the stage
station below the mountain and met Casey coming springily off the box with
whip and six reins in his hand. The lanky man was still pale from his
ride, and he spluttered when he spoke:
"Sa-ay! N-next time you're held up and I'm r-ridin' with yuh, b-by gosh,
you s-_stop_. I-I'd ruther be shot t-than p-pitched off into a
c-canyon, s-somewhere a-and busted up!"
Casey is a little man. When he was young he was slim, but he always has
owned a pale blue, unwinking squint which he uses with effect. He halted
where he was and squinted up at the man, and spat fluid tobacco and
grinned.
"You're here, and you're able to kick about my drivin'. That's purty good
luck, I'd say. You _ain't_ shot, an' you ain't layin' busted in no canyon.
Any time a man gits shot outa Casey Ryan's stage, he'll have to jump out
an' wait for the bullet to ketch up. And there ain't any passengers offn'
this stage layin' busted in no canyon, neither. I bring in what I start
out with."
The other man snorted and reached under his coat tail for the solacing
plug of chewing tobacco. Opposition and ridicule had brought a little
color into his face.
"Why, hell, man! You--you come around that ha-hairpin turn up there on two
wheels! It's a miracle we wasn't--"
"Miracles is what happens once and lets it go at that. Say! Casey Ryan
_always_ saves wear on a coupla wheels, on that turn. I've made it on one;
but the leaders wasn't runnin' right to-day. That nigh one's cast a shoe.
I gotta have that looked after." He gave up the reins to the waiting
hostler and went off, heading straight for the station porch where waited
a red-haired girl with freckles and a warm smile for Casey.
That was Casey's youth; part of it. The rest was made up of fighting,
gambling, drinking hilariously with the crowd and always with his temper
on hair trigger. Along the years behind him he left a straggling
procession of men, women and events. The men and women would always know
the color of his eyes and would recognize the Casey laugh in a crowd,
years after they had last heard it; the events were full of the true Casey
flavor,--and as I say, when men told of them and mentioned Casey, they
laughed.
From the time when his daily drives were likely to be interrupted by
holdups, and once by a grizzly that reared up in the road fairly under the
nose of his leaders and sent the stage off at an acute angle, blazing a
trail by itself amongst the timber, Casey drifted from mountain to desert,
from desert to plain and back again, blithely meeting hard luck face to
face and giving it good day as if it were a friend. For Casey was born an
optimist, and misfortune never quite got him down and kept him there,
though it tried hard and often, as you will presently see. Some called him
gritty. Some said he hadn't the sense to know when he was licked. Either
way, it made a rare little Irishman of Casey Ryan, and kept his name from
becoming blurred in the memories of those who once knew him.
So in time it happened that Casey was driving a stage of his own from
Pinnacle down to Lund, in Nevada, and making boast that his four horses
could beat the record--the month's record, mind--of any dog-gone
auty-_mo_-bile that ever infested the trail. Infest is a word that Casey
would have used often had he known its dictionary reputation. Having been
deprived of close acquaintance with dictionaries, but having a facile
imagination and some creative ability, Casey kept pace with progress and
invented words of his own which he applied lavishly to all automobiles;
but particularly and emphatically he applied the spiciest, most colorful
ones to Fords.
Put yourself in Casey's place, and you will understand. Imagine yourself
with a thirty-mile trip to make down a twisty, rough mountain road built
in the days when men hauled ore down the mountain on wagons built to bump
over rocks without damage to anything but human bones. You are Casey Ryan,
remember; you never stopped for stage robbers or grizzlies in the past,
and you have your record to maintain as the hardest driver in the West.
You are proud of that record, because you know how you have driven to earn
it.
You pop the lash over the ears of your leaders and go whooping down a
long, straight bit of road where you count on making time. When you are
about halfway down and the four horses are running even and tugging
pleasantly at the reins, and you are happy enough to sing your favorite
song, which begins,
"Hey, ole Bill! Can-n yuh play the fiddle-o?
Yes, by gosh! I--I--kin play a liddle-o--"
and never gets beyond that one flat statement, around the turn below you
comes a Ford, rattling all its joints trying to make the hill on "high."
The driver honks wildly at you to give him the road--you, Casey Ryan!
Wouldn't you writhe and invent words and apply them viciously to all Fords
and the man who invented them? But the driver comes at you honking,
squawking,--and you turn out.
You have to, unless the Ford does; and Fords don't. A Ford will send a
twin-six swerving sharply to the edge of a ditch, and even Casey Ryan must
swing his leaders to the right in obedience to that raucous command.
Once Casey didn't. He had the patience of the good-natured, and for awhile
he had contented himself with his vocabulary and his reputation as a
driver and a fighter, and the record he held of making the thirty miles
from Pinnacle to Lund in an hour and thirty-five minutes, twenty-six days
in the month. (He did not publish his running expenses, by the way, nor
did he mention the fact that his passengers were mostly strangers picked
up at the railway station at Lund because they liked the look of the
picturesque four-horses-and-Casey stagecoach.)
Once Casey refused to turn out. That morning he had been compelled to wait
and whip a heavy man who berated Casey because the heavy man's wife had
ridden from Pinnacle to Lund the day before and had fainted at the last
sharp turn in the road and had not revived in time to board the train for
Salt Lake which she had been anxious to catch. Casey had known she was
anxious to catch the train, and he had made the trip in an hour and
twenty-nine minutes in spite of the fact that he had driven the last mile
with a completely unconscious lady leaning heavily against his left
shoulder. She made much better time with Casey than she would have made on
the narrow-gauge train which carried ore and passengers and mail to Lund,
arriving when most convenient to the train crew. That it took half an hour
to restore her to consciousness was not Casey's fault.
Casey had succeeded in whipping the heavy man till he hollered, but the
effort had been noticeable. Casey wondered uneasily whether by any chance
he, Casey Ryan, was growing old with the rest of the world. That
possibility had never before occurred to him, and the thought was
disquieting. Casey Ryan too old to lick any man who gave him cause, too
old to hold the fickle esteem of those who met him in the road? Casey
squinted belligerently at the Old-man-with-the-scythe and snorted. "I
licked him good. You ask anybody. And he's twice as big as I am. I guess
they's a good many years left in Casey Ryan yet! Giddap, you--thus-and-so!
We're ten minutes late and we got our record!"
At that moment a Ford touring car popped around the turn below him and
squawked presumptuously for a clear passage ahead. Casey pulled his lash
off the nigh leader, yelled and charged straight down the road. Did they
think they could honk him off the road? Hunh! Casey Ryan was still Casey
Ryan. Never again would he turn out for man or devil.
Wherefore Casey was presently extricating his leaders from the harness of
his wheelers ten feet below the grade. On the road above him the driver of
the Ford inspected bent parts and a smashed headlight and cranked and
cranked ineffectively, and swore down at Casey Ryan, who squinted
unblinkingly up under his hatbrim at the man he likewise cussed.
They were a long while there exchanging disagreeable opinions of one
another, and Casey was even obliged to climb the steep bank and whip the
driver of the Ford because he had applied a word to Casey which had never
failed as automatic prelude to a Casey Ryan combat. Casey was frankly
winded when he finally mounted one of his horses and led the other three,
and so proceeded to Lund as mad as he had ever been in his life.
"That there settles it final," he snorted, when the town came into view in
the flat below. "They've pushed Casey off'n the grade for the first time
and the last time. What pushin' and crowdin' and squawkin' is done from
now on, it'll be Casey Ryan doin' it! Faint! I'll learn 'em something to
faint about. If it's Fords goin' to run horses off'n the trail, you watch
how Casey Ryan'll drive the livin' tar outa one. Dog-gone 'em, there ain't
no Ford livin' that can drive Casey off'n the road. I'll drive 'em till
their tongues hang out. I'll make 'em bawl like a calf, and I'll pound 'em
on the back and make 'em fan it faster."
So talking to himself and his team he rode into town and up to one of
those ubiquitous Ford agencies that write their curly-tailed blue
lettering across the continent from the high nose of Maine to the shoulder
of Cape Flattery.
"Gimme one of them dog-goned blankety bing-bing Ford auty-_mo_-biles," he
commanded the garage owner who came to meet Casey amiably in his shirt
sleeves. "Here's four horses I'll trade yuh, with what's left of the
harness. And up at the third turn you'll find a good wheel off'n the
stage." He slid down from the sweaty back of his nigh leader and stood
slightly bow-legged and very determined before the garage owner, Bill
Masters.
"Wel-l--there ain't much sale for horses, Casey. I ain't got any place to
keep 'em, nor any feed. I'll sell yuh a Ford on time, and--"
Casey glanced over his shoulder to make sure the horses were standing
quiet, dropped the reins and advanced upon Bill.
"You _trade_," he stated flatly.
Bill backed a little. "Oh, all right, if that's the way yuh feel. What yuh
askin' for the four just as they stand?"
"Me? A Ford auty-_mo_-bile. I told yuh that, Bill. And I want you to put
on the biggest horn that's made; one that can be heard from here to
Pinnacle and back when I turn 'er loose. And run the damn thing out here
right away and show me how it works, and how often you gotta wind it and
when. Lucky I didn't bring no passengers down--I was runnin' empty. But I
gotta take back a load of Bohunks to the Bluebird this afternoon, and my
stage, she's a total wreck. I'll sign papers to-night if you got any to
sign."
CHAPTER 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 a chew of tobacco and explained. "Well, I had a bet up, y'see.
That red-headed bartender in Pinnacle bet me a hundred dollars I couldn't
beat my own record ten minutes on the trip down. I knowed I could, so I
took him up on it. A man would be a fool if he didn't grab any easy money
like that. And so I pounded 'er on the tail, coming down. And I had eight
minutes peeled off my best time, and then Jim Black he had to go git in
the road on that last turn up there. We rammed our noses together and I
pushed him on ahead of me for fifty rods, Bill--and him yelling at me to
quit--but something busted in the insides of my car, I guess. She give a
grunt and quit. All right, I'll take this one. Grease her up, Bill. I'll
eat a bite before I take her up."
You've no doubt suspected before now that not even poker, played
industriously o' nights, could keep Casey's head above the financial
waters that threatened to drown him and his Ford and his reputation. Casey
did not mind repair bills, so long as he achieved the speed he wanted. But
he did mind not being able to pay the repair bills when they were
presented to him. Whatever else were his faults, Casey Ryan had always
gone cheerfully into his pocket and paid what he owed. Now he was haunted
by a growing fear that an unlucky game or two would send him under, and
that he might not come up again.
He began to think seriously of selling his car and going back to horses
which, in spite of the high cost of feeding them, had paid their way and
his, and left him a pleasant jingle in his pockets. But then he bumped
hard into one of those queer little psychological facts which men never
take into account until it is too late. Casey Ryan, who had driven horses
since he could stand on his toes and fling harness on their backs, could
not go back to driving horses. The speed fiend of progress had him by the
neck. Horses were too slow for Casey. Moreover, when he began to think
about it, he knew that the thirty-mile stretch between Pinnacle and Lund
had become too tame for him, too monotonous. He knew in the dark every
twist in the road, every sharp turn, and he could tell you offhand what
every sharp turn had cost him in the past month, either in repairs to his
own car or to the car that had unluckily met him without warning. For
Casey, I must tell you, habitually forgot all about that earsplitting
klaxon at his left elbow. He was always in too much of a hurry to blow it;
and anyway, by the time he reached a turn, he was around it; there either
was no car in the road or Casey had scraped paint off it or worse and gone
on. So why honk?
Far distances called Casey. In one day, he meditated, he could cover more
desert with his Ford than horses could travel in a week. An old,
half-buried passion stirred, lifted its head and smiled at him
seductively,--a dream he had dreamed of finding some of that wealth which
Nature holds so miser-like in her hills. A gold mine, or perhaps silver or
copper,--what matter which mineral he found, so long as it spelled wealth
for him? Then he would buy a bigger car and a faster car, and he would
bore farther and farther into yonder. In his past were tucked away months
on end of tramping across deserts and up mountain defiles with a packed
burro nipping patiently along in front of him and this same, seductive
dream beckoning him over the next horizon. Burros had been slow. While he
hurtled down the road from Pinnacle to Lund, Casey pictured himself
plodding through sand and sage and over malapai and up dry canyons, hazing
a burro before him.
"No, sir, the time for that is gone by. I could do in a week now what it
took me a month to do then. I could get into country a man'd hate to
tackle afoot, not knowing the water holes. I'll git me a radiator that
don't boil like a teakettle over a pitch fire, and load up with water and
grub and gas, and I'll find the Injun Jim mine, mebby. Or some other darn
mine that'll put me in the clear the rest of my life. Couldn't before,
because I had to travel too slow. But shucks! A Ford can go anywhere a
mountain goat can go. You ask anybody."
So Casey sold his stage line and the hypothetical good will that went with
it, and Pinnacle and Lund breathed long and deep and planned trips they
had refrained from taking heretofore, and wished Casey luck. Bill Masters
laid a friendly hand on his shoulder and made a suggestion so wise that
not even Casey could shut his mind against it.
"You're starting out where there won't be no Bill handy to fix what you
bust," he pointed out. "You wait over a day or two, Casey, and let me show
yuh a few things about that car. If you bust down on the desert you'll
want to know what's wrong, and how to fix it. It's easy, but you got to
know where to look for the trouble."
"Me? Say, Bill, I never had to go lookin' for trouble," Casey grinned.
"What do I need to learn how for?"
Nevertheless he remained all of that day with Bill and crammed on
mechanics. He was amazed to discover how many and how different were the
ailments that might afflict a Ford. That he had boldly--albeit
unconsciously--driven a thing filled with timers, high-tension plugs that
may become fouled and fail to "spark," carburetors that could get out of
adjustment (whatever that was) spark plugs that burned out and had to be
replaced, a transmission that absolutely _must_ have grease or something
happened, bearings that were prone to burn out if they went dry of oil,
and a multitude of other mishaps that could happen and did happen if one
did not watch out, would have filled Casey with foreboding if that were
possible. Being an optimist to the middle of his bones, he merely felt a
growing pride in himself. He had actually driven all this aggregation of
potential internal grief! Whenever anything had happened to his Ford
auty-_mo_-bile between Pinnacle and Lund, Casey never failed to trace the
direct cause, which had always been external rather than internal, save
that time when he had walked in and bought a new car without out probing
into the vitals of the other.
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