Casey Ryan | Page 7

hand yuh a diamond big as your
fist, some day. Ole Lady Trouble's always tryin' to take a fall outa me,
but she's never got me down so't I had to holler 'nough. You ask
anybody. Casey Ryan's goin' out to see what he can see. If he meets up
with Miss Fortune, he'll tame her, Bill. And this little Ford
auty-_mo_-bile is goin' to eat outa my hand. I don't give a cuss if she
does git sore and ram her spark plugs into her carburetor now and agin.
She'll know who's boss, Bill. I learnt it to the burros, and what you can
learn a burro you can learn a Ford, take time enough."
Taking that point of view and keeping it, Casey managed very well.
Whenever anything went wrong that his vocabulary and a monkey
wrench could not mend, Casey sat down on the shadiest running board
and conned the Instruction Book which Bill handed him at the last
minute. Other times he treated the Ford exactly as he would treat a
burro, with satisfactory results.

CHAPTER III
Away out on the high mesas that are much like the desert below, except
that the nights are cool and the wind is not fanned out of a furnace,
Casey fought sand and brush and rocks and found a trail now and then
which he followed thankfully, and so came at last to a short range of
mountains whose name matched well their inhospitable stare. The
Starvation Mountains had always been reputed rich in mineral and
malevolent in their attitude toward man and beast. Even the Joshua
trees stood afar off and lifted grotesque arms defensively against them.
But Casey was not easily daunted, and eerie places held for him no
meaning save the purely material one. If he could find water and the
rich vein of ore some one had told him was there, then Casey would be
happy in spite of snakes, tarantulas and sinister stories of the place.

Water he found, not too far up a gulch. So he pitched his tent within
carrying distance from the spring, thanked the god of mechanics that an
automobile neither eats nor drinks when it does not work, and set out to
find his fortune.
Casey knew there was a mining camp on the high slope of Barren Butte.
He knew the name of the camp, which was Lucky Lode, and he knew
the foreman there--knew him from long ago in the days when Casey
was what he himself confessed to be wild. In reaching Starvation
Mountains, Casey had driven for fifteen miles within plain sight of
Lucky Lode. But gas is precious when you are a hundred miles from a
garage, and since business did not take him there Casey did not drive
up the five-mile hill to the Lucky Lode just to shake hands with the
foreman and swap a yarn or two. Instead, he headed down on to the
bleached, bleak oval of Furnace Lake and forged across it as straight as
he could drive toward Starvation Mountains.
But the next time Casey made the trip--needing supplies, powder, fuse,
caps and so on--Fate took him by the ear and led him to a lady. This is
how Fate did it,--and I will say it was an original idea:
Casey had a gallon syrup can in the car which he used for extra oil for
the engine. Having an appetite for sour-dough biscuits and syrup, he
had also a gallon can of syrup in the car. It was a terrifically hot day,
and the wind that blew full against Casey's left cheek as he drove
burned even his leather skin where it struck. Casey was afraid he was
running short of water, and a Ford's comfort comes first,--as every man
knows; so that Casey was parched pretty thoroughly, inside and out.
Within a mile of Furnace Lake he stopped, took an unsatisfying sip
from his big canteen and emptied the rest of the water into the radiator.
Then he replenished the oil in the motor generously, cranked and went
bumping along down the trail worn rough with the trucks from Lucky
Lode.
For a little way he jounced along the trail; then the motor began to
labor; and although Casey pulled the gas lever down as far as it would
go, the car slowed and stopped dead in the road. After an hour of
fruitless monkey-wrenching and swearing and sweating, Casey began

to suspect something. He examined both cans, "hefted" them, smelt and
even tasted the one half-empty, and decided that Ford auty-_mo_-biles
do not require two quarts of syrup at one dose. He thought that a little
syrup ought not to make much difference, but half a gallon was
probably too much.
He put in more oil