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With ropes about the necks of the desert rat's six burros, they hauled and hammered and coaxed them one by one aboard the truck. Then on into the night they drove, over the vast, black desert. Seventy-five miles from Ragtown they stopped the car, and unloaded the burros and their snoring master.
One who has never lived in a frontier camp such as Ragtown may find it difficult to analyze the characters of Lucy Dalles and Albert Drummond. Less than a year before Ragtown had sprung up overnight, both had been ordinarily respectable American citizens. Lucy's crowning fault had been the lust for wealth.
Hiram had expressed the wish to see Uncle Sebastian again and to tell him all that had befallen him in driving jerkline to Ragtown. Hiram had learned a great lesson, he felt. He had left the north woods to do something less prosaic than driving jerkline, and a series of peculiar incidents had forced him back into the same old groove again.
But say For Heaven's sake! Look who's here!" His steel-blue eyes had taken in Lucy, who stood studying Jerkline Jo, the center of a crowd of rough, appreciative men who wrung her hands right and left. Lucy turned and flashed Tweet a bright smile. "I remember you, o' course," she said, shaking hands. "They tell me you hit the ball an awful bang down here in Ragtown.
Tweet did not return that night, and at dawn Hiram was away toward the mountains on the black mare, the precious paper secreted in his shirt. He was ten miles from Ragtown before it occurred to him what a fool he had been in not making a copy of it. Any one of a hundred things might happen to it. Still, the crazy prospector had carried it through all the years and had lost it.
"Fellow called Drummond has a big order to haul in trucks," the manager of the supply company had told her. "It's for a store that's going to open up at Ragtown, I understand. Guess he'll get it out tomorrow or next day." All went well with the wagon train during the first lap of the desert trip. Hiram rode with his employer, and their migratory institution of learning was in full swing.
He slowed down when he began to draw near to the horse and rider, and for an hour kept his distance while he waited for Hiram to reach another dry lake that was nearer to Ragtown than the first.
The first was the arrival of Jerkline Jo's wagon train, loaded to the gunwales with case goods, general merchandise, and food for stock. The arrival of Jerkline Jo and her proud huskies always was an event of importance at Ragtown.
But I was raised in a construction camp, you know, until I was pretty much of a young lady, and such things were entirely out of my ken. Then at Palada, where my foster father eventually settled and went into the freighting business and running a store, we were not so progressive as Ragtown even. So when I went to boarding school in the Middle West I was virtually immune from many of the new fads.
On the western verge of the Desert we halted a moment at Ragtown. It consisted of one log house and is not set down on the map. This reminds me of a circumstance. Just after we left Julesburg, on the Platte, I was sitting with the driver, and he said: "I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once.
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