Treasure and Trouble Therewith | Page 3

Jim Bailey crawled out on the axle, picked up the
dragging reins and got back just in time to keep Leonard from bouncing
out. He heaved him up and held him round the body, and when he got
the horses going straight, took a look at him. That first time he thought
he was dead, white as chalk and with his eyes turned up. But after a
spell of going he decided there was life in him yet, and holding him
with one arm, stretched the other over the splashboard, shaking the

reins on the wheelers' backs, and the way those horses buckled to their
work was worth gettin' held up to see.
Half an hour later the Rocky Bar stage came like a cyclone into
Mormons Landing, Jim Bailey hopping like a grasshopper on the front
seat, and on his arm Danny Leonard, shot through the lung. They drew
up in front of the Damfino Saloon, and Mormons Landing, dead among
its deserted ditches, knew again a crowded hour of glorious life.
Everybody came running and lined up along the sidewalk, later to line
up along the Damfino Bar. The widow woman who ran the eating
house put Danny Leonard in her own bed and sent one of her sons,
aged six, to San Marco for a doctor, and the other, aged eight, to
Jackson for the sheriff.
Before night fell the news had flashed through the countryside. On
ranch piazza and in cabin doorway, in the camps along the Mother
Lode and the villages of the plain, men were telling one another how
Knapp and Garland had held up the Rocky Bar stage and got away with
twelve thousand dollars in gold.

CHAPTER II
THE TULES
The place of the holdup was on the first upward roll of the hills. Farther
back, along more distant slopes, the chaparral spread like a dark cloth
but here there was little verdure. The rainless California summer had
scorched the country; mounded summit swelled beyond mounded
summit all dried to a uniform ochre. But if you had stood on the rise
where the stage stopped and faced toward the west, you would have
seen, stretching to the horizon, a green expanse that told of water.
This was the tules, a vast spread of marsh covered with bulrushes, flat
as a floor, and extending from a distant arm of the bay back into the
land. It was like a wedge of green thrust through the yellow, splitting it
apart, at one end meeting the sky in a level line, at the other narrowing

to a point which penetrated the bases of the hills. From these streams
wound down ravine and rift till their currents slipped into the brackish
waters of the marsh. Such a stream, dried now to a few stagnant pools,
had worn a way along the gulley where the holdup had occurred.
Down this gulley, the box between them, the bandits ran. Alders and
bay grew thick, sun spots glancing through their leaves, boughs
slapping and slashing back from the passage of the rushing bodies,
stones rolling under the flying feet. The heat was suffocating, the
narrow cleft holding it, the matted foliage keeping out all air. The men's
faces were empurpled, the gunny sacks about their necks were soaked
with sweat. They spoke little--a grunt, a muttered oath as a stone turned.
Doubled under the branches, crashing through a covert with closed eyes
and warding arm, they fled, now and then pausing for a quick change of
hands on the box or the sweep of a sleeve across a dripping brow.
Nearly a half hour from the time they had started they emerged into
brighter light, the trees growing sparse, the earth moist, a soft coolness
rising--the creek's conjunction with the tules.
The sun was sloping westward, the sky infinitely blue and clear, golden
light slanting across the plain's distant edges. Before them, silent, not a
breath stirring the close-packed growth, stretched the marshes. They
were miles in extent; miles upon miles of these level bulrush spears
threaded with languid streams, streams that curved and looped, turned
back upon themselves, narrowed into gleaming veins, widened to
miniature lakes on whose bosom the clouds, the birds and the stars
were mirrored. They were like a crystal inlay covering the face of the
tules with an intricate, shining pattern. No place was ever more
deserted, alien, uninhabitable, making no compromise with the friendly,
fruitful land.
Against the muddy edge a rotten punt holding a pole swung deliberate
from a stake. The men put the box in, then followed, and the elder,
standing in the stern, took the pole and, pushing against the bank, drove
the boat into deep water. It floated out, two ripples folding back oily
sleek from its bow. After the