Louisiana Lou Part 10

The Empire Pool Room was an innocent enough place to the uninitiate.

To those who had the confidence of the proprietor it was something else. There were rooms upstairs where games were played that were somewhat different from pool and billiards. There was also a bar up there and the drinks that were served over it were not of the soft variety. It seemed that Sucatash and Dave MacKay were known here and had the entree to the inner circles.

De Launay followed them trustfully. The only thing he took the trouble to note was at a rack in front of the place where--strange anachronism in a town that swarmed with shiny automobiles--were tethered two slumberous, moth-eaten burros laden with heavy packs, miners' pan, pick and bedding.

"Prospector?" he asked, indicating the dilapidated songsters of the desert.

The two cow hands looked at the beasts, identifying them with the facility of their breed.

"Old Jim Banker, I reckon. In for a wrastlin' match with the demon rum. Anything you want to know about the Esmeraldas he can tell you, if you can make him talk."

"Old Jim Banker? Old-timer, is he?"

"Been a-soakin' liquor and a-dryin' out in the desert hereaways ever since fourteen ninety-two, I reckon. B'en here so long he resembles a horned toad more'n anything else." This from Sucatash.

De Launay paused inside the door. "I wonder. Are there any more old-timers left hereaways?"

"Oh, sure. There's some that dates back past the Spanish War. I reckon 'Snake' Murphy--he tends bar for Johnny the Greek, who runs this honkatonk--he's one of 'em. Banker's another. You remember when them Wall Street guys hired 'Panamint Charlie' Wantage to splurge East in a private car scatterin' double eagles all the way and hoorayin' about the big mine he had in Death Valley?"

"No," said De Launay. "When was that?"

"Back in nineteen eight."

"I was in Algeria then. I'd never heard. But I remember Panamint. He and Jim Banker were partners, weren't they?"

"They was." Sucatash looked curiously at De Launay, wondering how a man who was in Algeria came to know so much about these old survivals.

"Leastways, I've heard tell they was both of them prospectin' the Esmeraldas a whole lot in them days and hangin' together. But Panamint struck this soft graft and wouldn't let Jim in on it, so they broke up the household. You know--or maybe you don't--that Panamint was finally found dead in a cave in Death Valley and there was talk that Banker followed him there and beefed him, thinkin' he really had a mine.

Nothin' come of it except to make folks a little dubious about Jim. He never was remarkable for popularity, nohow, so it don't amount to much."

"And Snake Murphy: he used to keep the road house at the ford over the river, didn't he?"

Once more Sucatash, fairly well informed on ancient history himself, eyed De Launay askance.

"Which he might have. That's before my time, I reckon. I was just bein' weaned when Louisiana was run out of the country. My old man could tell you all about it. He's Carter Wallace, of the Lazy Y at Willow Spring."

"I knew him," said De Launay.

"You knowed my old man?"

"But maybe he'd not remember me."

Sucatash sensed the fact that De Launay intended to be reticent. "Dad sure knows all the old-timers and their histories," he declared. "Him and old Ike Brandon was the last ranchers left this side the Esmeraldas, and since Ike checked in a year ago he's the last survivor. There's a few has moved into town, but mostly the place is all pilgrims and nesters."

They had climbed the stairs and come into the hidden sanctum of Johnny the Greek, and De Launay looked about curiously, noting the tables and the scattering of customers about the place, rough men, close cropped, hard faced and sullen of countenance, most of them, typical of the sort of itinerant labor that was filling the town with recruits and initiates of the I. W. W. There were one or two who were of cleaner strain, like the two young cowmen. Behind the bar was a red-faced, shifty-eyed man, wearing a mustache so black as to appear startling in contrast to his sandy hair. De Launay eyed him curiously, noting with a secret smile that his right arm appeared to be stiff at the wrist. He made no comment, however, but followed the two men to the bar where the business of the day began. It consisted of imbibing vile whisky served by the stiff-armed Snake Murphy.

But De Launay still had something on his mind. "You say Ike Brandon's dead?" he asked. "What became of his granddaughter?"

"Went to work," said Sucatash. "Dave, where's Marian Pettis?"

"Beatin' a typewriter fer 'Cap' Wilding, last I heard," said Dave.

"She was a little girl when I knew her," said De Launay, his voice softening a little with a queer change of accent into a Southern slur.

Snake Murphy, who was polishing the rough bar in front of him, glanced quickly up, as though hearing something vaguely familiar. But he saw nothing but De Launay's thoughtful eyes and sober face with its small, pointed mustache.

"'Scuse me, gents," he murmured. "What'll it be?"

"A very little girl," said De Launay, absently looking into and through Murphy. "A sort of little fairy."

The lanky Sucatash looked at him askance, catching the note of sentiment. "Yeah?" he said, a bit dryly. "Well, folks change, you know. They grow up."

"Yes," said De Launay.

"And this Marian Pettis, she done growed up. I ain't sayin' nothin'

against a lady, you understand, but she ain't exactly in the fairy cla.s.s nowadays, I reckon."

De Launay, somewhat to his surprise, although he sensed the note of warning and dry enlightenment in Sucatash's words, felt no shock. He had had a sentimental desire to see if the girl of six had fulfilled the promise of her youth after nineteen years, had even dreamed, in his soberer moments, of coming back to her to play the role of a prince, but nevertheless, he found himself philosophically accepting the possibility hinted at by Sucatash and even feeling a vague sort of relief.

"Who's Wilding?" he asked. They told him that he was a young lawyer of the town, an officer of their regiment during the war. They seemed to think highly of him.

De Launay had postponed his intended debauch. In spite of mademoiselle's conviction, his lapses from sobriety had been only occasional as long as he had work to do, and this occasion, after the information he had gathered, was one calling for the exercise of his faculties.

"If you-all will hang around and herd this here desert rat, Banker, with you when you can find him, and then call at the hotel for Mademoiselle d'Albret, I'll look up this lawyer and his stenographer.

I have to interview her."

He left them then and went out, a bit unsteady, seedy, unprepossessing, but carrying under his dilapidated exterior some remains of the man he had been.

He reached Wilding's office and found the man, a young fellow who appeared capable and alert. He also found, with a distinct shock, the girl who had occupied a niche in his memory for nineteen years. He found her with banged and docked hair, rouged and bepowdered, clad in georgette and glimmering artificial silk, tapping at a typewriter in Wilding's office. He had seen Broadway swarming with replicas of her.

His business with Wilding took a little time. He explained that mademoiselle might have need of his legal services and certainly would wish to see Miss Pettis. The lawyer called the girl in and to her De Launay explained that mademoiselle was the daughter of her grandfather's former employee and that she would wish to discuss with her certain matters connected with the death of French Pete. The girl swept De Launay with hard, disdainful eyes, and he knew that she was forming a concept of mademoiselle by comparison with his own general disreputableness.

"Oh, sure; I jus' as soon drop in on this dame," she said. "One o'

these Frog refygees, I s'pose. Well, believe me, she's come a long way to get disappointed if she thinks I'm givin' any hand-outs to granddad's pensioners. I got troubles of my own."

"We'll be at the hotel, Miss Pettis and I," said Wilding. "That will do, Miss Pettis."

The girl teetered out on her spiky heels, with a sway of hips.

De Launay turned back to the lawyer. "I've a little personal business you might attend to," he said. Wilding set himself to listen, resignedly, imagining that this b.u.m would yield him nothing of profit.

In ten minutes he was staring at De Launay with amazement that was almost stupefaction, fingering doc.u.ments as though he must awake from sleep and find he had been dreaming. De Launay talked on, his voice slightly thick, his eyes heavy, but his mind clear and capable.

Wilding went with him to a bank and, after their business there was finished, shook hands in parting with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval and awe.

De Launay, having finished the more pressing parts of his business, made straight for Johnny the Greek's. The two burros still stood there, eyes closed and heads hanging. He walked around them before going in. A worn, dirty leather scabbard, bursting at the seams, slanted up past the withers of one brute, and out of its mouth projected the b.u.t.t of a rifle. The plate was bright with wear, and the walnut of the stock was battered and dull with age.

De Launay scratched the chin of the burro, was rewarded by the lazy flopping of an ear and then went in to his delayed orgy.

He had received a shock, as he realized he would, and for the moment all thought of Solange and his responsibility to her had vanished. He had come back home after twenty years, seeking solace in the scenes he had known as a boy, seeking, with half-sentimental memory, a little girl with bright hair and sweet face. He had come to find a roaring, artificial city on the site of the range, the friends of his youth gone, the men he had known dying out, his very trade a vanishing art.