Treasure and Trouble Therewith | Page 6

wide till it showed the ranch kitchen,
windows open to the blue night, earth smells floating in, the table with
its kerosene lamp, the rancher reading the paper, his dog sleeping at his
feet, peaceful, unguarded, secure.
Conscious of distance to be traversed before he became a creature of
wary instincts and watchful eyes, he let his thoughts have way. They
slipped about and touched the future with a sense of ease, then veered
to the past. Here they steadied, memories rising photographically
distinct like a series of pictures, detached yet revealing an underlying
thread of connection:
First it was his youth in the Southwest when he had been Tom
Michaels, a miner, well paid, saving his wages. Then his marriage with
Juana Ramirez, the half-breed girl at Deming, and the bit of land he had
bought--with a mortgage to pay--in the glaring, green river valley.
Glimpses of their life there, children and work--stupefying, tremendous
work--to keep them going and to meet the interest; he had been a giant
in those days.
And even so he hadn't been able to do it. Six years after they took
possession they moved out, ruined. He remembered it as if it had been
yesterday--the adobe house with its flat roof and strings of red peppers
hanging on the walls, the cart piled high with furniture, Juana on the
front seat and Pancha astride of the mule. Juana had grown old in those
six years, fat and shapeless, but she had been dog-loyal, dog-loving, his
woman. Never a word of complaint out of her--even when the two
children died she had just covered her head with the blanket and sat by
the hearth, stoical, dry-eyed, silent.
He could see now that it was his dream of making money--big
money--that had been wrong. If he'd been content with a wage and a

master he'd have done better by her, but from the start he'd wanted his
freedom, balked at being roped and branded with the herd. That was
why he drifted back to mining, not a steady job, though he could have
got it, but as a prospector, leaving Arizona and moving to California.
There were years of it; he knew the mineral belt from the Panamint
mountains to the Kootenai country. Juana and Pancha plodded from
town to town, seeing him at intervals, always expecting to hear he'd
struck "the ledge," and be hardly able to scrape a living for them from
the bottom of his pan.
One picture stood out clearer than the rest, ineffaceable, to be carried to
his grave--the day he came back and heard that Juana was dead. He had
left them at a place in Inyo, a scattering of houses on the edge of the
desert. Pancha saw him coming, and her figure, racing to meet him in a
blown flutter of cotton skirt, was as plain before his eyes as if she were
running toward him now along the shining water path. She was twelve,
brown as a nut, and scarecrow-thin, with a tangle of black hair, and
narrow, dark eyes. He could recall the feel of her little hard hand inside
his as she told him, excited at imparting such news, pushing the hair off
her dirty face to see how he took it.
It had crushed the heart in him and some upholding principle of hope
and resolution broke. He found a place for Pancha with Maria Lopez,
the Mexican woman who ran the Buon Gusto restaurant at Bakersfield
and agreed to look after the girl for pay. Then he went back to the open,
not caring much, the springs of his soul gone dry. He had no energy for
the old life and did other things, anything to make his own food and
Pancha's keep--herded sheep, helped on the cattle ranges, tended store,
hung on the fringes of the wilderness, saw men turn to savages and
turned himself.
At long intervals he went down to the settlements and saw Pancha,
growing into a gawky girl, headstrong, and with the wildness of her
mother's people cropping out. She hated Maria Lopez and the work in
the restaurant and wanted him to take her to the mountains. When she
was sixteen a spell of illness laid him up and after that he had difficulty
in getting work. Two months passed without a payment and when he

finally got down to Bakersfield he found that Pancha had gone, run
away with a traveling company of actors. Maria Lopez and he had a
fight, raged at one another in mutual fury, and then he started out to
find his girl, not knowing when he did what he would do with her.
She solved that problem; she insisted on staying with the actors. She
liked the life, she could sing, they told